Mrs Crampton rose, trembling. They both knew but too well. It was the funeral coaches which they heard, coming back from the station where they had been ordered to await the nine o’clock train. ‘Let me go!’ cried Mrs Crampton wildly, rousing herself from her apparent apathy for the first time, ‘let me go to my child, my Jenny. I must be there to meet her.’ But Miss Bostock held her back. ‘Dear, dear Ellen,’ she said, ‘pray don’t go down stairs till John has come to fetch you; there is so much to be done yet. Stay here quietly, there’s a dear, till the arrangements are complete. Bradshaw promised to meet John and tell him where they were to carry her. Don’t make a scene in the hall. You know how he objects to any publicity.’ ‘A scene in the hall, Clem,’ said Mrs Crampton, in a voice of surprise. ‘And when I am going to meet my own child and welcome her home? I don’t understand you! Let me see, though. Isn’t she married? Didn’t she marry that Mr Walcheren, or is it a mistake? It must be a mistake, Clem, or why should she come back to us? My pretty Jenny, the beauty of Hampstead, as they call her! How glad I shall be to have her home again.’ ‘Good God!’ cried Miss Bostock, in an agony of terror, ‘her brain is going. John, John!’ she called out over the banisters, ‘come here quick to Ellen, she is very ill!’ The mournful _cortège_ had, by this time, entered the house, and deposited their burden on the white-draped table in the boudoir on the ground floor. The coffin had been temporarily closed, but the undertakers, who had met it at the station, unclosed it again, and Jenny Walcheren lay revealed, placid and immovable, under her father’s roof. Mr Crampton, hearing his sister-in-law’s appeal, and thinking his wife had fainted, ran upstairs at once, but was surprised to meet her on the landing with a strange look in her eyes, but an unmoved countenance, as she extended her hand to him. ‘John!’ she said, in a muffled voice, ‘our Jenny has come home. I heard her enter the house. Take me down to see her without delay.’ ‘Oh, John!’ whispered the terrified Aunt Clem, ‘it will kill her. Ought she to see her? I believe she is going out of her mind with grief.’ ‘Poor soul! and well she may,’ replied Mr Crampton, as he looked into his wife’s staring eyes. ‘But let her come; the sight can’t make her worse than she is. Come, Ellen,’ he added, affectionately, ‘come and see your lamb, then. God has taken her from us, Nelly, but there is no help for it, and railing won’t bring her back again. Come and see how peacefully she sleeps.’