It is not to be supposed that during this period the visits of Mrs. Brown, the schoolmistress, to her friend at the Hall, who was so like yet so unlike her--so unlike in personal importance--so superior in position, and yet so strangely resembling--should have ceased. There were no other two persons in all the precincts of Watcham so evidently belonging to the same world and species, and yet there were no two more separate in all those externals that distinguish life. Mrs. Brown’s visits were almost all paid in the evening, sometimes very late, sometimes at that hour before dinner when Mrs. Swinford was known to receive no one. But there was no bar at any time against the entrance of this privileged visitor. On the evening which Lord Will spent at the Hall Mrs. Brown came late, while dinner was going on. She had an entrance of her own by which she preferred to come in, a door which gave admittance to the servants’ quarters, but which was always open, and spared the schoolmistress the intervention of Morris, whom she did not dislike to see now and then, and metaphorically put her foot upon with the pride of a superior knowledge which he could not understand. But this malicious gratification, though she enjoyed it occasionally, was not enough to make up for the disadvantage of having her movements known and chronicled, and it suited her character and habits better to have a mode of access absolutely free and beyond control. She was so swift and subtle in her movements, and so fortunate, as the clandestine often are, in finding her passage free, that on many occasions she had glided through the great house, mounted the great stairs, and appeared noiseless in the ante-room occupied by Julie, the maid, without an individual in the house being aware that she was there. It had so happened on this particular night when even Julie was out of the way. Mrs. Brown came in noiseless, slightly breathless, having hurried upstairs, and just escaped meeting a strange young man, whose wide shirt-front indicated him in the partial darkness of the corridor as if he had carried a light, but whom to her surprise she did not know. A woman with her wits so much about her, knew by sight by this time everybody in the neighbourhood who was likely to dine with Leo. She avoided him by a rapid step aside, and consequently she was a little out of breath when she arrived in Julie’s room, where there was no one, a dereliction of duty that might have cost Julie her place had it been known. Mrs. Brown looked round her with a nod of satisfaction as she put off the heavy veil in which she was accustomed to wrap herself on these visits. She went into the inner room, and looked round with an even more vivid look of satisfaction. Mrs. Swinford’s luxurious room was as she had left it in the perfection of silent repose and comfort--soft light, soft warmth, everything that the most refined suggestion of luxury and ease could command. Mrs. Brown gave a sigh, and then a laugh. She said