“My dear, Sarah knows something about him,” said Aunt Milly; “somehow or other Sarah knows that he has a claim upon us. When she heard of the inquiries he was making, she was in a state of desperation--used to drive out with the carriage blinds down, poor soul, and kept watching all day long, so wretched and anxious that it would have broken your heart. But how it all is, and how about this Countess, and his being named Luigi, and his claim upon the estate, and her knowing him--though, so far as I can judge, he could be no more than born when she came home--Hark! was that somebody coming upstairs?” It was only some of the people of the house moving about. Aunt Milly gave a sigh of relief. “My dear, I’m more and more anxious since I’ve found _you_, to know the worst,” she said. “It is as great a mystery to you as to your baby, how he can have any connection with us. Dear, dear! to think of a quiet family, and such a family as the Mortimers, plunged all at once into some mystery! it is enough to break one’s heart;--but then, you see, Sarah was so long abroad.” “Was she long abroad?” said I, with a little cry. All at once, and in spite of myself, my old fancy about that old Miss Mortimer, whom I imagined living in my grandfather’s house, came back to my mind. The great beauty whom my good Mrs. Saltoun had seen abroad--how strange if this should be her after all! Somehow my old imaginations had looked so true at the time, that I seemed to remember them as if they were matters of fact and not of fancy. I looked up, quite with a consciousness that I knew something about it, in Aunt Milly’s face. “What do you know about her?” cried Aunt Milly, rising up quite erect and rigid out of her chair. Her excitement was extreme. She had evidently gone beyond the point at which she could be surprised to find any stranger throwing light upon her mystery. But at that moment those steps for which we had been listening did ascend the stairs. We could hear them talking as they approached, the Italian with his accent and rather solemn dictionary English, and Harry’s voice that sounded so easy in comparison. Aunt Milly sank back again into her chair. She grasped the arms of it to support herself, and gave me a strange half-terrified, half-courageous look. In another moment they had entered the room.