I recollected every incident, and everything confirmed my idea. She had taken a panic all at once,--she had driven five miles round to get out of his way; from that hour painful watchfulness and anxiety had come to her face. Carson was sent out to see that the road was clear, before, poor soul, she would venture out, though with the carriage blinds drawn down. Ah! I think if my only communication with the open air and the out-of-doors world was in the enclosure of that carriage with the blinds drawn down, I should certainly go mad, and quickly too! I had a long afternoon by myself in the library that day. I went back, as well as my memory would carry me, into the history of the Mortimers. Insanity was not in our family,--no trace of it. We had never been very clever, but we had been obstinately sane and sober-minded. My mother’s family too, the Stamfords, so far as I know, were all extremely steady people. It is odd when one individual of a family, and no more, shows a tendency to wander; at sixty, too, all of a sudden, with no possible reason. But who can search into the ways of Providence? It might perhaps never go any further; it might be the long silence of her life, and perhaps long brooding over such things as may have happened to her in the course of it. Something must have happened to Sarah; she was not like me. She had really lived her life, and had her own course in the world. She had known her own bitterness, too, no doubt, or she--she, the great beauty, the heiress,--would not have been Sarah Mortimer sitting voiceless by the fireside. She had been too silent, had too much leisure to go over her life. Her brain had rusted in the quietness; terrors had risen within her that took form and found an execution for themselves whenever, without any warning, she saw a strange face. This explained everything. I could see it quite clear with this interpretation; and without this nothing could explain it; for the young Italian looking for his friend, the lady whom nobody had ever heard of, could be nothing in the world to Sarah Mortimer. Thinking over this, it naturally occurred to me that it would be important to let my poor sister know that this innocent young object of her fears had left the neighbourhood. It might, even, who knows? restore the balance to her poor mind. I got up from my chair the moment I thought of that, but did not go out of the library quite so quickly as you might have supposed, either. I was afraid of Sarah’s passions and reproaches; I always was. She had a way of representing everybody else as so unkind to her, poor dear soul, and of making out that she was neglected and of no consequence. Though I knew that this was not the case, I never could help feeling uncomfortable. Perhaps if I could only have put myself in her place, I might have felt the same; but it made me very timid of starting any subject before her that she did not like, even though it might be to relieve her mind.