Caroline knew he had saved her life, but found herself unable to say so, or to thank him. And she knew that he didn't want her to. They said very little at her first visit, but it was plain what healing it brought him. She told Mrs. Bradby what he had done. "It was his quickness that saved me," she said, "and not thinking about himself. Very few people would have been able to think of what to do, and do it, in that fraction of time. The instinct _must_ have been to get out of the way." His mother must have known his secret. An instinct stronger than that of self-preservation had been at work, and Caroline owed her life to it, and he his injuries. She looked rather sadly at the beautiful girl sitting with her. They were in the Long Gallery, in which all the circumstances of this kindly hospitable family were expressed. She had been taken in just as if she belonged to all the wealth and ease, and the wide relationships, herself, and her son was being treated as if he were of it too. But his lot, and hers, were cast in very different places from that of the people who inhabited rooms of this sort, and had the relationships indicated by the photographs that were set about. They were of two different worlds--the world of work and the world of wealth, which never entirely coalesce, though contact is formed here and there between them. She looked at Caroline and saw her more in the light of the state of life to which she belonged than in that of her essential character. It was the first time that they had met, and though she was strongly attracted to her she had not yet gauged her fine true spirit. It was natural that she should be affected by her outward appearance, which betokened her birth and her station, and seemed to put her altogether out of reach of a young man who had enjoyed none of the advantages of wealth, and had none of the elasticity which enables some to climb up from rungs of the social ladder a good deal lower than that from which he had started. But before she left Abington, which she did two days after she first saw Caroline, she came to look at her son with new eyes, and it was Caroline who opened them for her.