For an inexperienced person it would have been a matter of several minutes, and during those minutes what awful risk of surprise and detection. One day, all being quiet, I did venture, and actually, with a beating heart, got so far as to find out the letter 'Il,' when I heard a step outside the door, which opened a little bit, and I heard Lady Knollys, luckily arrested at the entrance, talk some sentences outside, her hand still upon the door-handle. I shut the book, as Mrs. Bluebeard might the door of the chamber of horrors at the sound of her husband's step, and skipped to a remote part of the room, where Cousin Knollys found me in a mysterious state of agitation. On any other subject I would have questioned Cousin Monica unhesitatingly; upon this, somehow, I was dumb. I distrusted myself, and dreaded my odious habit of blushing, and knew that I should look so horribly guilty, and become so agitated and odd, that she would have reasonably concluded that I had quite lost my heart to him. After the lesson I had received, and my narrow escape of detection in the very act, you may be sure I never trusted myself in the vicinity of that fat and cruel 'Peerage,' which possessed the secret, but would not disclose without compromising me. In this state of tantalizing darkness and conjecture I should have departed, had not Cousin Monica quite spontaneously relieved me. The night before our departure she sat with us in our room, chatting a little farewell gossip. 'And what do you think of Ilbury?' she asked. 'I think him clever and accomplished, and amusing; but he sometimes appears to me very melancholy--that is, for a few minutes together--and then, I fancy, with an effort, re-engages in our conversation.' 'Yes, poor Ilbury! He lost his brother only about five months since, and is only beginning to recover his spirits a little. They were very much attached, and people thought that he would have succeeded to the title, had he lived, because Ilbury is _difficile_--or a philosopher--or a _Saint Kevin_; and, in fact, has begun to be treated as a premature old bachelor.' 'What a charming person his sister, Lady Mary, is. She has made me promise to write to her,' I said, I suppose--such hypocrites are we--to prove to Cousin Knollys that I did not care particularly to hear anything more about him. 'Yes, and so devoted to him. He came down here, and took The Grange, for change of scene and solitude--of all things the worst for a man in grief--a morbid whim, as he is beginning to find out; for he is very glad to stay here, and confesses that he is much better since he came. His letters are still addressed to him as Mr. Carysbroke; for he fancied if his rank were known, that the county people would have been calling upon him, and so he would have found himself soon involved in a tiresome round of dinners, and must have gone somewhere else. You saw him, Milly, at Bartram, before Maud came?' Yes, she had, when he called there to see her father.