She had to give great orders and make many arrangements about the opening up of the house. It was so long since it had been shut up. Tom had been only six, and now he was seventeen and a half. She wrote to her sister Edith and to Edith’s husband, John Erskine, as well as to the factor on the estate and the servants who were in charge. And there were a number of things sent from town ‘to make it habitable.’ To make it habitable! She could not help the feeling that this was what _he_ would have liked least of all, when she remembered the wonderful costly catafalques of furniture of which he had been so proud, and the decorations that would make poor Edward miserable. Edward did not mind the fact that it was _his_ money which made Easton so comfortable; but to put up with his wardrobes and sideboards--that was a different matter. Even in her humiliation and in the much greater troubles she had to occupy her, she could not help a shudder to think of Edward in the midst of all those showy relics of the past. Eleven years had not dimmed her own recollection of her old surroundings. She remembered with an acute recollection, which was pain, where everything stood, and sent detailed directions as to how all was to be altered. ‘Dear Edith, do see that everything is changed. Don’t let anything look as it used to do. It would kill me if the rooms were left as they were,’ she wrote to her sister. ‘Do--do see that everything is changed.’ Perhaps it was by dint of having thus exhausted all feeling and forestalled all emotion that when she did find herself at the Towers at last, it was almost without sentiment of any kind. Edith had carried out her _consigne_ very well, and she was standing under the mock mediæval doorway to receive her sister when Lady Car drove up. The sisters had not met for a long time--not for several years, and the meeting in itself did much to break the spell. Carry awoke with wonder and a little relief to find herself next morning in her old home, and to feel that she did not mind. Torrance did not meet her at his own hearth; he did not look at her from the mirror; he did not follow her about the corridor. She was very much relieved after all her imaginary anguish to feel that the reality was less dreadful than she had feared.