Lady Mary’s room was unoccupied and cold,—­cold, though it was summer, with the chill that rests in uninhabited apartments.  The blinds were drawn down over the windows; a sort of blank whiteness, greyness, was in the place, which no one ever entered.  The child rushed on with eager gestures, crying, “Look! look!” turning her lively head from side to side.  Mary, in a still and passive expectation, seeing nothing, looking mechanically to where Connie told her to look, moving like a creature in a dream, against her will, followed.  There was nothing to be seen.  The blank, the vacancy, went to her heart.  She no longer thought of Connie or her vision.  She felt the emptiness with a desolation such as she had never felt before.  She loosed her arm with something like impatience from the child’s close clasp.  For months she had not entered the room which was associated with so much of her life.  Connie and her cries and warnings passed from her mind like the stir of a bird or a fly.  Mary felt herself alone with her dead, alone with her life, with all that had been and that never could be again.  Slowly, without knowing what she did, she sank upon her knees.  She raised her face in the blank of desolation about her to the unseen heaven.  Unseen! unseen! whatever we may do.  God above us, and those who have gone from us, and He who has taken them, who has redeemed them, who is ours and theirs, our only hope,—­but all unseen, unseen, concealed as much by the blue skies as by the dull blank of that roof.  Her heart ached and cried into the unknown.  “O God,” she cried, “I do not know where she is, but Thou art everywhere.  O God, let her know that I have never blamed her, never wished it otherwise, never ceased to love her, and thank her, and bless her.  God!  God!” cried Mary, with a great and urgent cry, as if it were a man’s name.  She knelt there for a moment before her senses failed her, her eyes shining as if they would burst from their sockets, her lips dropping apart, her countenance like marble.

XIII.

“And she was standing there all the time,” said Connie, crying and telling her little tale after Mary had been carried away,—­“standing with her hand upon that cabinet, looking and looking, oh, as if she wanted to say something and couldn’t.  Why couldn’t she, mamma?  Oh, Mr. Bowyer, why couldn’t she, if she wanted so much?  Why wouldn’t God let her speak?”

XIV.

Mary had a long illness, and hovered on the verge of death.  She said a great deal in her wanderings about some one who had looked at her.  “For a moment, a moment,” she would cry; “only a moment! and I had so much to say.”  But as she got better, nothing was said to her about this face she had seen.  And perhaps it was only the suggestion of some feverish dream.  She was taken away, and was a long time getting up her strength; and in the meantime the Turners insisted that the chains should be thoroughly seen to, which were not all in a perfect state.  And the earl coming to see the place, took a fancy to it, and determined to keep it in his own hands.  He was a friendly person, and his ideas of decoration were quite different from those of his grandmother.  He gave away a great deal of her old furniture, and sold the rest.