All this time he kept himself carefully away from speech or look of Janet, who had been, strange as it was, less affected by the calamity than any one in the house, and had a look in her dry eyes which Fred could not understand. His heart revolted against her; a woman without feeling, who had no tears for the man who had surrounded her with comforts and ensured her well-being for her life--the man who was her child, whom she had nursed, but never mourned. A sort of hatred sprang up in the lad’s mind towards this old woman. He felt it a wrong and almost insult that he should have been bidden to take her advice--and avoided her as if she had been the plague. Janet, on the contrary, seemed to seek opportunities of encountering him, appearing suddenly about the house, as she had never hitherto done, in all kinds of unlikely places. Her unobtrusiveness had been one of her great qualities in former times. She had never been seen on the stairs or in the corridor, scarcely at all, except at the opening of the passage leading to her own room, or sitting in the sun by the laundry door, or about the servants’ part of the house. But now old Janet seemed to be everywhere. Fred met her in the hall, lingering about the library, in the gallery above which encircled the hall, everywhere save in his mother’s drawing-room. And whenever she met him, though she did nothing to stop him, she gave him a look full of significance. It seemed to say, “When are you coming to consult me? I want to be consulted,” till the young man became exasperated, and fled from her with an ever-growing sense of trouble or fear. Her apparition in her large white mutch, with a black ribbon round it, tied in a great bow on the top of her head, with her black and white shepherd’s plaid shawl, which she had adopted, instead of the old red and green tartan, in compliment to the family mourning--gave him a sensation of shivering, as if old Janet had included in her own person the properties of all the Fates. He was afraid of what she might have to say to him--afraid lest there should be something to tell which would be hateful to hear; afraid for his father’s good name and his own peace.