Despite the changes which eighteen years had brought about, Hermia knew Miss Pengarvon at once. The chilly, unsympathetic, blue-grey eyes, and the heavy brows were there as of old, but the once dark locks were now nearly snow white, and although her face had always been long and thin, the bones now stood out with startling prominence, with the shrunken, yellow-ivory skin stretched tightly over them. But in the steel-cold eyes there now shone something which caused Hermia's heart to beat faster even than it had beat on entering the room. It was the gleam of incipient insanity which she saw there, although she knew it not. Notwithstanding the warmth of the weather, a few embers were burning in the grate, and it was not till Barney moved aside and proceeded to rake them together that Miss Pengarvon's eyes fell on Hermia. Not even by as much as the flicker of an eyelid did she evince the slightest surprise at sight of the girl. "So you have come at last," she said, speaking in the hard, measured tones of an icy displeasure. "How many times have I had to tell you of late that I will not have you wandering in the park at this late hour of the afternoon? You see, Letitia, how utterly unbiddable the girl is." Here she was evidently addressing the unseen occupant of the vacant chair. "You choose to plead for her, and to urge this and that in her favor, although I have told you over and over again that Isabel's is one of those disobedient and ungrateful dispositions on which kindness is absolutely thrown away." Then, turning to Hermia, she added, frowningly, "I have nothing more to say to you. Go to your room, and stay there till I give you permission to leave it." Who was the Isabel for whom Miss Pengarvon evidently mistook her? Hermia could not help asking herself; could it be her mother? But it was not a time to ask questions. Advancing a step or two she said, "My name is not Isabel, Miss Pengarvon. I am Hermia Rivers. Do you not remember seeing me here when I was a little girl?" "Hermia Rivers!" echoed Miss Pengarvon, in a whisper loud enough for the others to hear, as a person at the moment of waking might repeat with a kind of frightened surprise some name which, spoken in his ear, had been enough to break his sleep. "And who, pray, may Hermia Rivers be?" she demanded next moment, as she rose slowly and not without difficulty from her chair and drew herself up to her full height. "No such person is known to me." Then, turning abruptly on the trembling Barney, she said, "How many times have I given you my orders that, on no pretence whatever, should you introduce any one into my presence without having first obtained my permission to do so? Take this young woman away at once--at once, I say--and never let me see her face again! She is an intruder. I know her not!" With an imperious gesture she pointed to the door. The old man beckoned sorrowfully to Hermia, and the two left the room without a word more.