But Mary and I felt differently. I did, at least, and I am sure so did she. You cannot mend a rent so easily. Such a rent--a rent that had lasted more than five years--how can it be drawn together again by any hasty needle and thread like a thing done yesterday? We parted friends, with promises to meet again; but with hearts, oh! so much more apart from each other than they had been an hour before! An hour before we met I had all sorts of vague hopes in my mind--vague feelings that she would understand me, that I should understand her--vague yearnings towards the old union which was almost perfect. Did you ever see the great glass screen they have in some houses to shield you from the heat of the fire? You can see the cheerful blaze through it, but you feel nothing. Something of the kind was between Mary and me. We saw through it as well as ever, and seemed, to enjoy the pleasant warmth; but no other sensation followed, only the chill of a disappointment. I felt that she was now nothing, nothing to me; and I--I cannot tell how I seemed to her. We had the old habit suddenly brought to life and put on again, but none of the old meaning. We were like mummers trying to make ourselves out to be heroines of the past, but knowing we were not and never could be what we appeared. I was very silent during our drive home I did not know what to say to my dear old lady. She looked very fragile with her pretty rose-cheeks, lying back in the corner of the fly; she was fatigued, and in the daylight I suddenly woke up to see that she did look very fragile. I had not believed in it before. And how could I vex her by telling her of my disappointment? I could not do it; she was pleased and happy; she held my hand, and nodded to me and said: “Now you see you are not so much alone as you thought you were. Now you see you have friends who belong to you.” How could I have had the heart to say otherwise--to say I had found out that we were separated for ever, Mary and I? That evening, however, after tea, she began to talk to me very seriously. We were sitting over the fire--she on her favourite sofa, I on a low chair near her. The firelight kept dancing about, lighting up the room fitfully. It was a large room. We had some candles on the mantel-piece, which shone, reflected in the great mirror, as if from some dim, deep chamber opening off this one; but it was really the firelight that lighted the room. I had been singing to her, and I half thought she had been asleep, when suddenly she roused up all at once, and sat upright in her little prim way. “I want to speak to you, Mary,” she said; and then, after a pause--“You think I meant nothing but love and kindness when I took you to see Mrs Peveril to-day; but I am a scheming, wicked old woman, Mary. I had more than that in my mind.”