The thought awakened her own ready sympathy for herself and there were tears in her eyes and a flush on her cheek when she stood on her own doorstep and rang the bell of her own house. A new parlour-maid--she could not help starting--though she must have known on reflection that this would be the case--opened the door and stood looking politely receptive. Mrs. Elles saw the comedy of the situation and laughed gently. Then she put a florin into the girl’s hand, and, bidding her pay the cabman, brushed past her into the house and into the dining-room. The room was empty, unchanged, a little untidier than it used to be in her day. A sour look came over her face as the accustomed horrors smote her sense, fresh and undulled by previous contact with them. “If he has dared to touch my drawing-room!” she muttered and, opening the door of that apartment, surveyed it. It was just as she had left it, a passably pretty and tasteful room. She went up to the wall and instinctively set the frame of a picture straight. “Bring tea at once,” she ordered peremptorily of the astonished maid, sitting down in her own especial place at the corner of the sofa. “Where is Mrs. Poynder?” “Oh, Miss, did you want Mrs. Poynder?” said the servant, with obvious relief. “Mrs. Poynder is away. She went into Yorkshire yesterday. Mrs. Elles is away too.” “I am Mrs. Elles,” said that lady calmly, judging that the comedy in the maid’s case had lasted long enough. “You are the new parlour-maid, I suppose. What is your name? When do you expect Mrs. Poynder back?” “Mrs. Poynder only went for the night, Miss--Ma’am. She expects to be home for dinner.” “What an extraordinary thing for Aunt Poynder to do!” said Mrs. Elles, speaking aloud. “Now go and get tea. I am dying for it.” The girl went. Then her mistress gave one despairing look around the room and hid her face in the sofa cushion. Sorrow’s crown of sorrow had come upon her suddenly--the contrast between her own drawing-room and the little ascetic room at Rokeby, that spoke so clearly of its inmate, had come across her mind with cruel poignancy. “Oh, God, if it is going to be like this!” she murmured, choking with sobs. Only a few hours ago, in the plain bald room that was Paradise to her, and now here among all these pictures, photographs, books, symbols of the tedious domesticity she had been prepared to take up, but which struck her now as horrible, so much more horrible than she had anticipated! “I hate you!” she said to the grandfather over the mantelpiece. She kicked the early Victorian embroidered footstool at her feet savagely away.