Restless with the thought of the other’s forlorn neighbourhood, suddenly feeling that it is impossible to lay down her own tired limbs until they have carried her over the way to the mournful house darkening on the hillside above her, Susan rises, and, pulling aside the window-curtain, looks out--since the Rectory does not belong to the solid-shuttered breed of its eighteenth-century neighbour--on the night. It is such as the afternoon had promised--still, black, and murk; the little absurd finger-nail-paring of a moon wholly vanished behind the opaque vapours. “I could find my way blindfold!” is the undeterred looker’s thought; and so goes out into the hall, snatches a bowler hat and an Inverness cape from the stand, and, unbarring the hall-door, starts back with a sudden shiver of alarm; for, before her, stands a tall dark figure, with a lantern in its hand. “I was just making up my mind to ring!” says the voice of Lavinia. “What! Were you going out? Were you coming to me?” “Great wits jump!” answers Susan, with a tremulous laugh, “Come in! come in!” and so pulls the girl over the threshold by her cold gloveless fingers, and into the glowing warmth. “I must not forget my lantern! I do not know what I should have done without it! I could not see an inch before my face!” “It is a pitchy night!” Each utters her _banalité_ mechanically--the elder in a strange moved shyness; the younger taking hungry possession, with her drawn eyes, of each familiar object. “I had just been reproaching myself for not having hung up a stocking for you!” Susan says, with another nervous laugh. “What would you have put into it?” They are standing opposite each other on the hearthrug, Lavinia’s hand still lying in Mrs. Darcy’s clasp. Is it possible, the latter asks herself, in astonished self-chiding, that this stupid new shyness has mastered her so far as to make her wonder how soon it would be proper to release it? Lavinia herself solves the problem. Gently disengaging her fingers, she throws back the hood of her cloak, and, for a heart-beat or two, they take silent stock of each other. The long thick wrap conceals the girl’s figure, but face and hands betray that Miss Carew has dwindled to half her size. Yet did ever saner eyes look out from under level brows? Whatever else has happened, Mrs. Prince’s lugubrious prognostic is not fulfilled. Lavinia Carew’s reason has _not_ given way. “You have grown very thin!” “Do not you remember that Rupert always used to laugh at me for my dread of getting fat?” Then, seeing the startled half-frightened look in her friend’s face, “You wonder that I am able to mention him? Well, I have had good practice; for five months we have never talked of anything else! No!”--correcting herself--“I am wrong. Sometimes we have talked of Bill, but never, _never_, NEVER of anything else!” “For _five_ months?”