To the ladies of the family he was more interesting, for various reasons. Rose and her mother regarded him with perfectly simple and uncomplicated views. If he should happen to prove agreeable, if things fitted in and came right, why then--the arrangement was one which might have its advantages. The original estate of Mount which was comprehended in the entail was not a large one, but still it was not unworthy consideration, especially when _he_ had a little and _she_ had a little besides. Anne, it need not be said, took no such serious contingency into her thoughts. But she too looked for Heathcote’s arrival with curiosity, almost with anxiety. He was one who had been as she now was, and who had fallen--fallen from that high estate. He had been loved--as Anne felt herself to be loved; but he had been betrayed. She thought with awe of the anguish, the horror of unwilling conviction, the dying out of all beauty and glory from the world, which it must have been his to experience. And he had lived long years since then, on this changed earth, under these changed skies. She began to long to see him with a fervour of curiosity which was mingled with pity and sympathy, and yet a certain touch of delicate scorn. How could he have lived after, lived so long, sunk (no doubt) into a dreamy routine of living, as if mere existence was worth retaining without hope or love? She was more curious about him than she had ever been about any visitor before, with perhaps a far-off consciousness that all this might happen to herself, mingling with the vehement conviction that it never could happen, that she was as far above it and secure from it as heaven is from the tempests and troubles of earth.