And not the least amazing circumstance connected with her being vaguely the town talk is that people hovering on the confines of Mr. Sladdery’s high connexion, people who know nothing and ever did know nothing about her, think it essential to their reputation to pretend that she is their topic too, and to retail her at second-hand with the last new word and the last new manner, and the last new drawl, and the last new polite indifference, and all the rest of it, all at second-hand but considered equal to new in inferior systems and to fainter stars.  If there be any man of letters, art, or science among these little dealers, how noble in him to support the feeble sisters on such majestic crutches!

So goes the wintry day outside the Dedlock mansion.  How within it?

Sir Leicester, lying in his bed, can speak a little, though with difficulty and indistinctness.  He is enjoined to silence and to rest, and they have given him some opiate to lull his pain, for his old enemy is very hard with him.  He is never asleep, though sometimes he seems to fall into a dull waking doze.  He caused his bedstead to be moved out nearer to the window when he heard it was such inclement weather, and his head to be so adjusted that he could see the driving snow and sleet.  He watches it as it falls, throughout the whole wintry day.

Upon the least noise in the house, which is kept hushed, his hand is at the pencil.  The old housekeeper, sitting by him, knows what he would write and whispers, “No, he has not come back yet, Sir Leicester.  It was late last night when he went.  He has been but a little time gone yet.”

He withdraws his hand and falls to looking at the sleet and snow again until they seem, by being long looked at, to fall so thick and fast that he is obliged to close his eyes for a minute on the giddy whirl of white flakes and icy blots.

He began to look at them as soon as it was light.  The day is not yet far spent when he conceives it to be necessary that her rooms should be prepared for her.  It is very cold and wet.  Let there be good fires.  Let them know that she is expected.  Please see to it yourself.  He writes to this purpose on his slate, and Mrs. Rouncewell with a heavy heart obeys.

“For I dread, George,” the old lady says to her son, who waits below to keep her company when she has a little leisure, “I dread, my dear, that my Lady will never more set foot within these walls.”

“That’s a bad presentiment, mother.”

“Nor yet within the walls of Chesney Wold, my dear.”

“That’s worse.  But why, mother?”

“When I saw my Lady yesterday, George, she looked to me—­and I may say at me too—­as if the step on the Ghost’s Walk had almost walked her down.”

“Come, come!  You alarm yourself with old-story fears, mother.”

“No I don’t, my dear.  No I don’t.  It’s going on for sixty year that I have been in this family, and I never had any fears for it before.  But it’s breaking up, my dear; the great old Dedlock family is breaking up.”