I could not help thinking so as I sat beside her. Her head still trembled slightly; but I suppose that was an habitual motion. She sat there shut up in herself,--her misery and her relief, and the cold dauntless spirit that must have risen from that smart encounter yesterday, and gained strength by the very struggle--hidden from everybody round her, as if they had been a world away. I gazed and wondered, almost trembled, at that extraordinary death in life. She who had all the tumult of passion and guilt in her memory; she who must have entered into the fullest excitement of life, and got entangled in its most dreadful perplexities; she who was no ascetic, nor even pretended to that rival excitement of the devotee which might have replaced the other; how could she have lived silent and obdurate through those dreadful years? The very thought of them struck me aghast. After her life of flattery, admiration, and universal homage; after her experience, whatever that might be, of more personal passions, to drop for a longer time than my whole life behind that screen into that chair! As I sat opposite to her, my thoughts turned back to that other Miss Mortimer, whom I had placed in imagination in my grandfather’s house. Once more I thought I could see that large low room which I never had seen, except in fancy, with the ancient beauty sitting silent by the fire amid the ghosts of the past. Was this the true impersonation of that dream of mine? Was this the Miss Mortimer, with her foreign count, whom Mrs. Saltoun remembered? As this recurred to me I could scarcely help a little start of quickened curiosity and eagerness. It seemed to flicker before me as a possible interpretation of all this dark enigma, could only the connecting link be found. As I was wandering deeper and deeper into these thoughts--so deep as to forget the strange position I stood in, and the possibility of being taken for a kind of domestic spy, which had embarrassed me at first--I heard a little commotion outside. The door, perhaps, was ajar, or it might be simply that my ears were quickened by hearing a little cry from baby, and Lizzie’s voice belligerent and full of determination. I got up hastily and went to the door. I don’t think Miss Mortimer even lifted her eyes to notice my movement. It was certainly Lizzie in some conflict with one of the authorities of the house; and Lizzie, as the natural and primitive method of asserting her own way, had unconsciously elevated her voice; a proceeding which alarmed baby, and also, as it appeared, her antagonist. I ran and threw the door open as I heard another cry from my little boy. There, outside, was a curious scene. Lizzie, in her out-of-doors dress, just returned from a walk in the garden with baby, with her face a little flushed, and her plentiful hair somewhat blown about by the wind, was resolutely pressing forward to enter the drawing-room, where, to be sure, she had no business to come; while holding her back by her cloak,