Visitors! I did not know how to receive them; and not only visitors but relatives of my own--of my mother's--her only remaining kindred. I went down with a flutter at my heart to see my unknown kin. He was with them, Alice told me, and I composed myself as well as I could before I entered the room; for by this time we had grown to a dull uncommunicating antagonism, and his presence stimulated me to command myself. It was past Christmas now, and we had spent more than two months in this system of mutual torment. We had been once or twice asked out, and we had gone and behaved ourselves so as not to betray the full extent of the breach between us; but we asked no one to our house--a house in which dwelt such a skeleton; and nobody can fancy how intolerable this dreary _tête-a-tête_, in which each of us watched the other, and no one spoke save the few necessary formalities of the table, became every day. Yet how every day we began in the same course, never seeking to separate--keeping together as pertinaciously as a couple of lovers, and with the strangest fascination in this silent contest. To look back upon this time is like a nightmare to me. I feel the heavy stifling shadow, the suppressed feverish excitement, the constant expectation and strain of self control when I think of it. I wonder one of us was not crazed by this prolonged ordeal; I think a few days of it would make me frantic now. I stood for a moment at the door listening to their voices before I entered--they were cordial, sincere voices, pleasant to hear, and in spite of myself I brightened at the kindly sounds. There were three of them--father, mother, and daughter--and when I entered the room, the first thing I saw was a pretty sweet girlish face, very much like the portrait which Mr. Osborne gave me of my mother, looking up all smiles and dimples at my husband's. I cannot tell how it happened, but for the moment it struck me what a much more pleasant home this Cottiswoode would have been, had that sunny face presided over it--and what a dull sullen heavy countenance in comparison was that clouded and unhappy face which glanced back at me as I glanced at the mirror. I wondered what _he_ thought on the subject, or if it had crossed his fancy; but I had no time to pursue the question, for suddenly I was overwhelmed in the shawl and embrace of a large kind smiling woman, the mother of this girl.