I can’t tell how it was, I am sure,--but I felt just as if I had missed a visit from a friend whom it would have been a great comfort to see. I might have forgotten this little incident altogether, but for something that happened afterwards. Ellis had to go into Chester that day--indeed, he had just left a few minutes before my pretty young stranger came up. When Ellis came back he took an opportunity of speaking privately to me--indeed, he asked me to step aside into the hall for a minute. How he found out that there was any uneasiness in my mind, or that any doubt about our right to the estate had ever occurred to me, I cannot tell; there are few things more wonderful than the kind of instinct by which servants divine the storms which may be only brooding about a house. Ellis looked very grave and important; but as he always does so, I was noways alarmed. “There was a young lady, ma’am,” said Ellis, “rode in the omnibus along with me this afternoon; well, not perhaps what you might call a _real_ lady neither; leastways I don’t know--her looks was all in her favour; but ladies, as you know, ma’am, don’t go riding in an omnibus with bits of nursegirls and babies. But I don’t say she was one of your common sort.” “Why, it must have been that pretty young creature,” said I. “Well, ma’am,” said Ellis, actually with a little shame-facedness, “if you ask me my opinion, she was a pooty young creature, and so was the baby. But it ain’t what she looked, Miss Milly; it’s what she said. She asked as anxious as could be after the family at the Park.” “Did she know anything of us?” said I, quite delighted. “I wonder who she is; she quite took my heart.” “Not if you’d have heard her speak, ma’am,” said Ellis. “She asked, kind of curious like, how you came to succeed to the estate, and whether there wasn’t no gap in the line, and if none o’ the family were ever passed over, and a deal of such questions. I told her it was Eden Hall she was thinking on, but she wasn’t satisfied. She said wasn’t there another claimant to the estate, and was I quite sure you was the right people and hadn’t passed over nobody? But the strangest thing of all was, as soon as I let out by accident I belonged to the Park, it was all over in a twinkling. Afore you could know where you was, from asking her questions and looking as anxious as you please, and her little veil up over her bonnet, and her face turned to you like a child--in a moment, ma’am, it was dead shut up and drawn back, and the veil down and face as if it didn’t see the place you was. I said to myself, ‘There’s summut in this,’ as soon as ever I seed the way she took me belonging to the Park; and, to be sure, all the way not another word. Seeing things like that, I made bold to look after her when she went out; and if you might chance to have any curiosity, Miss Milly, here’s a note of the address.”