The carriage stopped with a sudden creaking and jar. John had not observed where they were. He stumbled out now to his feet and held the door for her to get out. The door of the house was open, and his grandfather stood in the opening. The old man came down through the little garden slowly, shuffling with his heavy feet. There seemed to John’s feverish eyes some change, he scarcely knew what, in the house, as if the expectation, the waiting, had come to an end. ‘Emily,’ said old Mr. Sandford, ‘you are too late. Your mother is dead.’ ‘Dead?’ she said, standing still at the gate. ‘Half-an-hour ago.’ The two, father and daughter, stood facing each other, with John behind not able to convince himself that there was anything real in it, that it was not all a dream. ‘Do you mean me to go back again, straight,’ she said, ‘from your door?’ CHAPTER XII. EMILY. She came into the parlour first, where she sat down close to the fire. She shivered as she looked round, Mr. Sandford and John both standing behind looking at her. There was indeed already upon the house that air of revolution, the cold strangeness of a place which is no longer the centre of domestic life, but fit only for an ante-chamber and waiting-room for those who cannot be at the point of deepest interest. There was an unusual chill in this place which had always been so warm. John could see now for the first time what his mother was like. She did not resemble either of her parents. Her features were marked and high; her complexion of an ivory paleness; her hair quite black in original colour, with a thread or two of grey--altogether a tragic woman whom nobody could pass without a certain interest. She showed no emotion, nothing beyond the seriousness of aspect which was evidently habitual to her. For a little time even she said nothing, but held with a shiver her hands to the fire. Her father stood beside her leaning upon the mantel-piece, looking down upon the hearth, and for some time there was not a word spoken. ‘Half-an-hour ago,’ she repeated at length, in a low voice. ‘Did she know I was on the way?’ ‘For twenty hours she has scarcely taken any notice. The last was----’ ‘The last must have been what she said to the boy,’--his mother spoke of him as if he were a thing and not a person--‘and that was, he says, about me, something he did not understand. I hope there was no talk about---- affairs.’ ‘Emily, you are not softened, even by death.’ ‘It is not in me, I suppose,’ she said, with a sigh. Then she turned round to John. ‘Why did you not tell me that she was ill? You wrote from yourself. You said nothing about her--or nothing to speak of. If you had told me she was ill, I might have been in time.’ They both turned and looked at him, his grand-father with heavy eyes and a blank aspect of exhaustion and helplessness, but, with so much expression as was left in him, reproachful too.