It seemed to Lady Bell as if a cloud of anticipated awkwardness and indefinable constraint and distress had burst and vanished, as such clouds will sometimes vanish at the moment of contact. She had found again her indulgent, magnanimous Mrs. Sundon, on whose favour and generosity Lady Bell could throw herself confidently—only she would spare both her friend and herself in the first hours of their meeting. When Lady Bell had composed herself to scrutinize and draw conclusions, it struck her with quick pain that Sunny was looking ill. Mrs. Sundon wore an exceedingly simple muslin dress, with the tight sleeves ending in frills at the wrist, and falling over the hands, the neckerchief being surmounted with the same wide plaited frills, out of which rose the fair pillar of the throat, like the neck of a white heifer out of a garland. But Lady Bell had never seen the grand womanly proportions brought nearer to the spareness of attenuation, while the face was almost wan in its colourlessness. Clearly Mrs. Sundon had not been flourishing on keeping house alone; she had been wont to treat “nerves” and “vapours”—regarded as bodily complaints, with lofty derision and condemnation; yet her own nerves were unstrung, for she continued, though she did not allow it in words, to be agitated by Lady Bell’s arrival. There was a stir and quiver of Mrs. Sundon’s features as of a rock which had been disturbed and shaken, and could not at once regain its entire balance and firm quietude. Lady Bell could not account for the involuntary disturbance and the striving in vain to overcome it, in her friend’s expressive face, and in her cold passive hand, which shook sensibly in Lady Bell’s feverish clasp, unless it were that Mrs. Sundon’s health had become impaired. If that were so, there must be laid to Lady Bell’s charge, among other acts of wilfulness and indiscretion, an ungracious oversight—the friend who had been so good to Lady Bell had pined in her absence, and had been left to pine. Or was it simply the disturbance in Lady Bell’s own flushed face, the thrilling of her own pulses, which her morbid fancy and guilty conscience transferred to her poor abused friend? No; here was an absent-minded, distrait woman, who had to assume an interest which she did not feel, in narratives that ought to have been, from her old familiarity with the scene, and her sisterly regard for the heroine, stimulating and engrossing in their effect upon the listener. Lady Bell was conscious of this while she sat chattering incessantly of all her different adventures, at the auctions and the routs, and was not once pulled up and brought to book by such searching cross-examination as the judge, jury, and counsel for the prosecution combined in the old Sunny, would have known well how to conduct.