John fixed on the following evening for his revelation, as the three were seated alone in the little parlor after tea. There was a keen frost outside, but the lamplighted interior had all that cosy cheerfulness which we associate in our thoughts with mid-winter weather. John sat on one side of the fireplace, more engaged with his own musings than with the newspaper in his hand, which he used occasionally by way of a fire-screen. A little way apart sat Hermia, between whom and Miss Brancker was a small oval work-table. The spinster was busy with her crewels, while the girl was engaged in mending some delicate old lace belonging to her aunt. Now and again Aunt Charlotte would glance up from her work to Hermia's sunny face, who, all unconscious of the scrutiny and wrapped up in some pleasant daydream, would let her needle come to a pause every few minutes as if to count her heart-beats, a slow, faint smile curving her lips the while, and the luminous depths of her dark-blue eyes becoming more luminous still. Then, with an almost imperceptible start, she would seem to call to mind where she was and the work on which she was engaged, and for a little while her needle would move in and out of the lace with the unerring precision of a machine. "What can have come to her?" queried Miss Brancker of herself. "She is not the same girl she was even so short a time ago as last week. Of course, loving John as she does, it lifted a great load off her mind--though neither she nor I had ever the least doubt as to the result of the trial--when he was acquitted; but is there not something more than that which so often causes her cheeks to flush and then pale again as they never used to do, and has set the seal of some secret happiness on her face?" Then she added, as sagely as if she knew all about such matters: "And what but one thing should there be in all the world to cause a young maiden to fall into daydreams and forget where she is, and, although her eyes are wide open, to see nothing of what is going on around her! 'She walks in meads of Asphodel, and sunlight dwells in all her ways,'" quoted the spinster, who was still as fond of poetry as any girl of eighteen. And with that she gave a little sigh, and went on with her work. It was from one of these daydreams that John's voice, addressing her after a rather long silence, brought back Hermia with a start. "My dear," he said, speaking slowly and softly, "do you ever go back in memory to that far-off time before you came to us, or try to piece together whatever fragments you may still retain of the earliest recollections of your childhood?" The dazzling light in Hermia's eyes, as she turned them on him the moment he spoke to her, died out of them as her mind took in the purport of his question.