In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles with green shades. Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the table. The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order to look through them. Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful shape as she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip accompanied every downstroke. There were two large antique rings on her forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards and forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary one of the nib upon the paper. 'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.' A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea, knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she raised her eyes. 'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said. 'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?' The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once, had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own. 'I saw a great cruel bird chasing a harmless duck!' she exclaimed innocently. 'And I ran after to see what the end of it would be--much further than I had any idea of going. However, the duck came to a pond, and in running round it to see the end of the fight, I could not remember which way I had come.' 'Mercy!' said her mother-in-law, lifting her large eyelids, heavy as window-shutters, and spreading out her fingers like the horns of a snail. 'You might have sunk up to your knees and got lost in that swampy place--such a time of night, too. What a tomboy you are! And how did you find your way home after all!' 'O, some man showed me the way, and then I had no difficulty, and after that I came along leisurely.' 'I thought you had been running all the way; you look so warm.' 'It is a warm evening. . . . Yes, and I have been thinking of old times as I walked along,' she said, 'and how people's positions in life alter. Have I not heard you say that while I was at Bonn, at school, some family that we had known had their household broken up when the father died, and that the children went away you didn't know where?' 'Do you mean the Julians?' 'Yes, that was the name.'