Mrs. Sandford looked at him wistfully when she came downstairs (always a little later). She caught his hand when he came and stood by her sofa looking down at her, thinking how bright and liquid her eyes were. How large and deep the sockets seemed, as if they had widened out, and what a pallor had come upon her face--her little face! She was a small woman, but now her face was like the face of a child, all but the widened circle about her eyes. She put her hand upon his, the touch felt like a feather, and looked up at him wistfully, but without speaking. He had gone out immediately after breakfast, half stupified, and taken a long walk, his chief object being not to see her, not to give her any information. But he was obliged to answer the question in her eyes. ‘I have had a letter, grandmamma. She says she can’t come.’ ‘Can’t come, John!’ The old lady kept looking up at him, till suddenly her eyes grew dim with two great tears. She clasped her hands together with a low cry. He could see the disappointment, which was so unexpected, go over her like a flood. She could not say any more. Her lips quivered--it was all she could do in her weakness not to break down altogether, and whimper and moan like a child. ‘Can’t come!’ she repeated, after a time, with little broken sobs. ‘Grandmamma, don’t take it like that, and break my heart. It is my fault. I began to write as if it was me only, and I felt it a good deal and went on and on from myself, not from you. She thinks it was only my letter, only I that wanted her. She seems to have thought that it was rather impudent of me to ask.’ ‘She could not have done that. She could not have done that,’ said the old lady. She was so used to mastering herself that she had by this time succeeded in doing so, though her lip trembled and she kept softly drying her eyes: for at her age the eyes only get full with a dew of pain, they do not pour forth easy floods of tears like those that are young. John felt that she was, like himself, cast down from a height of expectation. She began to smile after a time very pathetically with her quivering lips. ‘We mustn’t forget,’ she said, ‘that it’s just Emily’s way.’ ‘Oh, grandmamma,’ cried John, ‘can’t you understand that I don’t want to think any more of her as Emily. She is not Emily to me.’ ‘We must not judge her hardly, my dear. She has always had a way of her own. She was one that never could bear the idea of disgrace or--anything of that kind. She would bear a great deal, but, if anyone brought discredit on the family, that she could not bear. She was more like a man than a woman in that way. A woman has to put up with everything, John.’ ‘I don’t see why she should, any more than a man.’