I was thankful to sit down by myself a little in the silence. Sara was out, it appeared, and I threw myself into an easy-chair, and actually felt the quietness and green-twilight look of the room, with just a touch of sunshine here and there upon the carpet near the windows, a comfort to me. Once again, as you may suppose, I thought it all over; but into the confused crowd of my own thoughts, where Sarah, Carson, Mr. Luigi, his fat servant, my new-found Milly Mortimer, and all her belongings, kept swaying in and out and round about each other, there came gleams of the other people suggested by this room;--Mr. Cresswell trying to make some light out of the confusion, Sara darting about, a mischievous, bewildering little sprite, and even, by some strange incoherency of my imagination, Sara’s poor pretty young mother, dead seventeen years ago, flickering about it, with her melancholy young eyes. Poor sweet lonely creature! I remember her a bride in that very room, with Bob Cresswell who might almost have been her father, very fond, but not knowing a bit what to make of her; and then lying helpless on the sofa, and then fading away out of sight, and the place that had known her knowing her no more. Ah me! I wonder whether that is not the best way of getting an end put to all one’s riddles. If Sarah and I had died girls, we should have been girls for ever,--pleasant shadows always belonging to the old house. Now it would be different, very different. When we were gone, what story might be told about us? “In their time something dreadful occurred about the succession, proving that they had never any right to the estate;” or “the great lawsuit began between the heirs of a younger branch and a supposed son of Squire Lewis.” Dear! dear! Who could this young man be? and now here was our real relation, our pretty Milly Mortimer--our true heir, if we were the true heirs of the estate. Dare I let her believe herself the heir of the Park with this mystery hanging over all our heads? Poor dear child, she was thinking more about her husband’s marching orders than if a hundred Parks had been in her power. Trouble there, trouble here; everywhere trouble of one sort or another. I declare I felt very tired of it all, sitting in that cool shady drawing-room. I could turn nowhere without finding some aggravation. This is how life serves us, though it seems such a great thing to keep in life. “But, godmamma, how in all the world did you come here?” cried Sara Cresswell, springing upon me suddenly, before I had seen her come in, like a kitten as she was; “you who never come to Chester but in great state, to call upon people! It’s only one o’clock, and there’s no carriage about the streets, and you’ve got your old brown dress on. How _did_ you get here?”