These feelings, impressions, facts--you may designate them as you please--took up their place in his mind all in that first instant, and seated themselves there for ever. Not yet very consciously. To his stunned senses, in his weight of bitter grief, nothing could be to him very clear: ideas passed through his brain quickly, confusedly; as the changing scenes in a phantasmagoria. He looked round as one bewildered. The bed, prepared for occupancy, on which, on entering, he had expected to see the dead, but not _her_, was between him and the door. Sarah Anne Grame in her invalid chair by the fire, a table at her right hand, covered with adjuncts of the sick-room--a medicine-bottle with its accompanying wine-glass and tablespoon--jelly, and other delicacies to tempt a faded appetite--Sarah Anne sat there and gazed at him with her dark hollow eyes, from which the tears rolled slowly over her cadaverous cheeks. Lady Sarah stood before him; sobs choking her voice as she wrung her hands. Ay, both were weeping. But he----it is not in the presence of others that man gives way to grief: neither will tears come to him in the first leaden weight of anguish. Thomas Godolphin listened mechanically, as one who cannot do otherwise, to the explanations of Lady Sarah. "Why did you not prepare me?--why did you let it come upon me with this startling shock?" was his first remonstrance. "I did prepare you," sobbed Lady Sarah. "I telegraphed to you last night, as soon as it had happened. I wrote the message with my own hand, and sent it off to the office before I turned my attention to any other thing." "I received the message. But you did not say--I thought it was,"--Thomas Godolphin turned his glance on Sarah Anne. He remembered her state, in the midst of his own anguish, and would not alarm her. "You did not mention Ethel's name," he continued to Lady Sarah. "How could I suppose you alluded to her? How could I suppose that she was ill?" Sarah Anne divined his motive for hesitation. She was uncommonly keen in penetration: sharp, as the world says; and she had noted his words on entering, when he began to soothe Lady Sarah for the loss of a child; she had noticed his startled recoil, when his eyes fell on her. She spoke up with a touch of her old querulousness, the tears arrested, and her eyes glistening. "You thought it was I who had died! Yes, you did, Mr. Godolphin, and you need not attempt to deny it. You would not have cared, so that it was not Ethel." Thomas Godolphin had no intention of contradicting her. He turned from Sarah Anne in silence, to look inquiringly and reproachfully at her mother. "Mr. Godolphin, I could not prepare you better than I did," said Lady Sarah, "When I wrote the letter to you, telling of her illness----" "What letter?" interrupted Thomas Godolphin. "I received no letter."