All the sweetness and kindness which had so cheered her advent, and lessened the pain of her arrival, had gone, and was replaced by a cold indifference--which was Margaret's only possible way of being unlike herself. Poor Mrs. Dorriman imagined that she was in some way in fault, and blamed herself for her abstraction, but her efforts were quite unavailing--the girl's one anxiety was to prove her loyalty and allegiance to her sister. She was conscious of a dawning feeling of affection for the little woman who sat looking pale and sweet opposite Mr. Sandford's massive figure. She had felt her clinging arms round her, and the feeling had been of comfort and sympathy, but Grace decreed otherwise, and Grace's word was her law. Never, perhaps, sat four people together whose thoughts were of so different a nature; when four people live together, generally, there is, at any rate a bond of union, some interest, in which, however much they diverge in their thoughts towards it, forms, at last, something in common--here there was nothing! Mr. Sandford, at other times an acute observer, noticed nothing to-night. The face of his sister opposite to him affected him strangely. No one had so faced him since his wife had died, and he was so busy looking through the long vista of years, and seeing the one creature he had ever loved, looking back at him from the past, that he ate mechanically and did not speak. At length he roused himself and addressed Mrs. Dorriman, "I hope you will bring things into better order," he said abruptly; "if the cook cannot do better than this, you must change her. I look to you. I'm not a dainty man, but I pay for the best and I intend having the best." "And I will do my best," said Mrs. Dorriman, gently. "You should know about things. I do not know how it was done, but there was some comfort in the old place, and I suppose you had something to do with that." "Of course I did see about things. I do not know if they were very comfortable." "They were," he said, emphatically, "and you will find they want stirring up in this house. The morning I was taken ill there was not one soul out of bed. I rang and rang and only a wretched girl answered. You must alter all that. I expect you to keep everyone and everything in order, and in good order too; and," he added--looking round, not at the girls but well above their heads--"if any one gives trouble, they go!"