And more and more to John was this melancholy period like a dream. It all fitted in, one event with another--the meeting at the station, the pause at the door, when he thought for a moment that Emily would have turned back, and gone away without entering the house; and then that scene upstairs, the tall figure all in black, her bonnet still on, a veil drooping over her face, holding up the light over the snow-cold whiteness of the bed and the dead face on the pillow. He shuddered when he thought of that scene. It was all a dream--a dream from which he might perhaps awake to see all these sombre circumstances disappear, and the old, sweet life which was real--the only real life he could think of, with the two old faces, full of love, beaming on him--would come back. But that, John knew very well, it would never do. And what was it that lay before him?--new work, a strange place, his old grandfather left alone and desolate, his mother of whom he had once dreamed disappeared into thin air, and nothing certain in the world but Emily, who was and was not Emily, but---- But now the dream within dreams had gone. He did not believe that she was his mother. He began to think, in all seriousness, that his mother must have been a younger sister, one, perhaps, about whom there was a mystery, who had perished along with his father, who--but that seemed very confusing and wonderful to think of--might have been the subject of that secret of which his grandmother had spoken. It was all so strange, so little clear, that this solution of the matter took stronger form in John’s thoughts. On the evening after the funeral they were all seated together once more like the old arrangement, two on different sides of the fire, the boy in the middle with his book, but, ah! so different. No kind looks exchanged across him, all meaning love to him; no interest in what he was doing; no consciousness on his part that he was the principal figure, the centre of their thoughts. John was of no importance now, and felt it. He was in the background, an insignificant unit in the group. His grandfather sat, saying nothing, limp in his chair, a little irritable, ready to watch any movement, while Emily (he could not call her anything but Emily) sat between the fire and the table with her work. Presently John awoke to the consciousness that she was talking of himself. ‘I should like you to tell me what you have arranged about the boy?’ ‘The boy’ was what she called him almost always. And the words were never uttered without rousing a sense of injury in John’s heart. ‘How can I tell you,’ said Mr. Sandford, ‘about John or anything? Do you think I’m able to be troubled about that?’ ‘You must,’ she said, in her steady, serious tone, ‘for in a day or two I shall have to go back, and all business should be settled before I go.’