“Yes, I’m here,” said Laura, and Mrs. Melcombe, arrayed in blue poplin, stepped into view, and made Brandon feel very foolish and Laura very cross.

“Oh! you’ve brought Mr. Brandon here to see the carp,” said Amelia graciously, but she hardly knew what to think, and they all presently went to the pond, and watched the creatures flashing up their golden sides, each wondering all the time what the two others were thinking of.  Then as it was nearly lunch time, Amelia and Laura proceeded to leave the dell, Brandon attending them and helping them up the steps.  He was rather vexed that he had not been able to say his say and give Laura a certain packet that he had in his possession; and as the afternoon presently clouded over and it began to pour with rain, he hardly knew what to do with himself till the bright idea occurred to him that he would ask Mrs. Melcombe to show him the old house.

Up and down stairs and into a good many rooms they all three proceeded together.  Hardly any pictures to found a question or a theory on; no old china with a story belonging to it; no brown books that had been loved by dead Melcombes.  This could not have been a studious race.  Not a single anecdote was told of the dead all the time they went over the place, till at last Mrs. Melcombe unlocked the door of a dark, old-fashioned sitting-room upstairs, and going to the shutters opened one of them, saying, “This is the room in which the dear old grandmother spent the later years of her life.”

This really was an interesting old room.  Laura and Amelia folded back the shutters with a genuine air of reverence and feeling.  It was most evident that they had loved this woman whose son had forbidden her to leave her property to him.

Two or three dark old pictures hung on the walls, and there was a cabinet on which Laura laying her hand, said—­

“The dear grandmother kept all her letters here.”

“Indeed,” Brandon answered; “it must have been very interesting to you to look them over. (And yet,” he thought “you don’t look as if you had found in them anything of much interest.”)

“We have never opened it,” said Mrs. Melcombe.  “Mr. Mortimer, when he was here, proposed to look over and sort all the letters for me, but I declined his offer.”

("And no doubt made him miserable by so doing”) was Brandon’s next thought.

“I shall keep the key for my dear boy,” she continued, “and give it to him when he comes of age.”

("To find out something that he will wish he didn’t know.”) thought Brandon again. ("That cabinet, as likely as not, contains the evidence of it, whatever it is.”)

“And in this gallery outside,” she proceeded, “the dear grandmother used to walk every day.”

Brandon perceived that he had got to the core and heart of the place at last.  His interest was so intense that he failed to conceal it.  He walked to the window and noticed the pouring rain that was streaming between the rustic pillars of the balustrades into the garden below.  He examined the pictures; only two of them were portraits, but in the background of one was an undoubted representation of the house itself; the other was a portrait of a beautiful boy in a blue jacket and a shirt with a wide frill laid back and open at the neck.  Under his arm appeared the head of a greyish dog.