“Am I to read this?”

“When I am gone, my Lady, if you please, and then remembering the most that I consider possible.”

“I know of nothing I can do.  I know of nothing I reserve that can affect your son.  I have never accused him.”

“My Lady, you may pity him the more under a false accusation after reading the letter.”

The old housekeeper leaves her with the letter in her hand.  In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion.  But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reality, so long schooled for her own purposes in that destructive school which shuts up the natural feelings of the heart like flies in amber and spreads one uniform and dreary gloss over the good and bad, the feeling and the unfeeling, the sensible and the senseless, she had subdued even her wonder until now.

She opens the letter.  Spread out upon the paper is a printed account of the discovery of the body as it lay face downward on the floor, shot through the heart; and underneath is written her own name, with the word “murderess” attached.

It falls out of her hand.  How long it may have lain upon the ground she knows not, but it lies where it fell when a servant stands before her announcing the young man of the name of Guppy.  The words have probably been repeated several times, for they are ringing in her head before she begins to understand them.

“Let him come in!”

He comes in.  Holding the letter in her hand, which she has taken from the floor, she tries to collect her thoughts.  In the eyes of Mr. Guppy she is the same Lady Dedlock, holding the same prepared, proud, chilling state.

“Your ladyship may not be at first disposed to excuse this visit from one who has never been welcome to your ladyship”—­which he don’t complain of, for he is bound to confess that there never has been any particular reason on the face of things why he should be—­ “but I hope when I mention my motives to your ladyship you will not find fault with me,” says Mr. Guppy.

“Do so.”

“Thank your ladyship.  I ought first to explain to your ladyship,” Mr. Guppy sits on the edge of a chair and puts his hat on the carpet at his feet, “that Miss Summerson, whose image, as I formerly mentioned to your ladyship, was at one period of my life imprinted on my ’eart until erased by circumstances over which I had no control, communicated to me, after I had the pleasure of waiting on your ladyship last, that she particularly wished me to take no steps whatever in any manner at all relating to her.  And Miss Summerson’s wishes being to me a law (except as connected with circumstances over which I have no control), I consequently never expected to have the distinguished honour of waiting on your ladyship again.”

And yet he is here now, Lady Dedlock moodily reminds him.