But was the waiting to be over now?--was something coming? If so, she must be prepared. And so, diligently, by the lamp-light, Eleanor produced her own letters, and opened that torn sheet to compare the writing. It was different in some things, yet the same. As she gazed, and examined, and compared terminations, and matched the capital letters together, she knew it was the same handwriting. Time had done its work. The writing of the present was firmer, harder, done with a worse pen, written at greater speed. But that was all the change. She was convinced; and she put away her sorrow-laden store, locked them safe from sight, said her night prayers, and went to bed. Not a sigh, nor a tear. No vain regrets, no heart-easing groans. The time for such consolations had long been passed with Eleanor. Within the last nine years her life had as much changed as if she had died and risen again into another world of intermediate trial. A very great change had been wrought in her by Lady Greystock's friendship. Eleanor had become educated. The clever, poetical girl, who had won Horace Erskine's attention by her natural superiority to everything around her--even when those surroundings had been of a comparatively high state of cultivation, had hardened into the industrious and laborious woman. When it pleased Lady Greystock to hear her sing, in her own sweet, untaught way, the songs of her own country, she had sung them; and then, when Lady Greystock had offered to cultivate the talent, she had worked hard at improvement. She had been brought up by French nuns, at a convent school, and had spoken their language from childhood; when Lady Greystock got French books, it was Eleanor's delight to read aloud; and she had made Mrs. Blagden's two little girls almost as familiar with French as she was herself. Those things had given rise to the idea that Mrs. Evelyn, as she was always called, had seen better days; and no one had ever suspected her relationship to Jenifer. Mr. Brewer alone knew of it. As to Mr. Brewer ever telling anything that could be considered, in the telling, as a breach of confidence, that was, of course, impossible. That night--that night so important in our story, Jenifer, having done all her duties by her mistress, which were really not a few, and having seen that the girl who did the dirty work was safe in the darkness of a safely put out candle, opened her lattice to look on the night. Her little room had a back view. That is, it looked over the flagged kitchen court, and the walled-in flower garden, and beyond toward the village of Blagden and the majestic woods at the back of the house at Beremouth.