She was very, very quiet for a few minutes after she found herself alone. She clasped her hands behind her head, and lay back in the light chair, looking out of the window. She was thinking so deeply that she did not even stir for a while; but in the end she got up, as though moved by some impulse, and crossed the room. Against the wall hung a long, narrow mirror, and she went to this mirror and stood before it, looking at herself from head to foot,--at her piteously sharpened face, with its large, wondering eyes, eyes that wondered at themselves,--at the small, light figure so painfully etherealized, and about which the white wrapper hung so loosely. She even held up, at last, the slender hand and arm; but when she saw these uplifted, appealing, as it were, for this sad, new face which did not seem her own, she broke into a little cry of pain and grief. “If you could see me now,” she said, “if you should come here by chance and see me now, my dear, I think you would not wait to ask whether I had been true or false. I never laid this white cheek on your shoulder, did I? Oh, what a changed face it is! I know I was never very pretty, though you thought so and were proud of me in your tender way, but I was not like this in those dear old days. Grif, Grif, would you know me,--would you _know_ me?” And, turning to her chair again, she dropped upon her knees before it, and knelt there sobbing. CHAPTER XVI. ~ IF YOU SHOULD DIE. THE postman paid frequent visits to Bloomsbury Place during these summer weeks. At first Dolly wrote often herself, but later it seemed to fall to Miss MacDowlas to answer Aimée's weekly letters and Mollie's fortnightly ones. And that lady was a faithful correspondent, and did her duty as readily as was possible, giving all the news, and recording all Dolly's messages, and issuing regular bulletins on the subject of her health. “Your sister,” she sometimes wrote, “is not so well, and I have persuaded her to allow me to be her amanuensis.” Or, “Your sister is tired after a rather long drive, and I have persuaded her to rest while I write at her dictation.” Or sometimes, “Dolly is rather stronger, and is in excellent spirits, but I do not wish her to exert herself at present.” But at length a new element crept into these letters. The cheerful tone gave way to a more dubious one; Dolly's whimsical messages were fewer and farther between, and sometimes Miss MacDowlas seemed to be on the verge of hinting that her condition was a weaker and more precarious one than even she herself had at first feared.