‘I’m awful afraid of the Governor, I am.  Did I snore that time?’

‘No, dear; at least, I did not hear it,’ I said, unable to repress a smile.

‘Well, if I didn’t, I was awful near it,’ she said, reflectively.

We found poor Mary Quince dozing over the fire; but we soon had tea and other good things, of which Milly partook with a wonderful appetite.

‘I was in a qualm about it,’ said Milly, who by this time was quite herself again.  ’When he spies me a-napping, maybe he don’t fetch me a prod with his pencil-case over the head.  Odd! girl, it is sore.’

When I contrasted the refined and fluent old gentleman whom I had just left, with this amazing specimen of young ladyhood, I grew sceptical almost as to the possibility of her being his child.

I was to learn, however, how little she had, I won’t say of his society, but even of his presence—­that she had no domestic companion of the least pretensions to education—­that she ran wild about the place—­never, except in church, so much as saw a person of that rank to which she was born—­and that the little she knew of reading and writing had been picked up, in desultory half-hours, from a person who did not care a pin about her manners or decorum, and perhaps rather enjoyed her grotesqueness—­and that no one who was willing to take the least trouble about her was competent to make her a particle more refined than I saw her—­the wonder ceased.  We don’t know how little is heritable, and how much simply training, until we encounter some-such spectacle as that of my poor cousin Milly.

When I lay down in my bed and reviewed the day, it seemed like a month of wonders.  Uncle Silas was always before me; the voice so silvery for an old man—­so preternaturally soft; the manners so sweet, so gentle; the aspect, smiling, suffering, spectral.  It was no longer a shadow; I had now seen him in the flesh.  But, after all, was he more than a shadow to me?  When I closed my eyes I saw him before me still, in necromantic black, ashy with a pallor on which I looked with fear and pain, a face so dazzlingly pale, and those hollow, fiery, awful eyes!  It sometimes seemed as if the curtain opened, and I had seen a ghost.

I had seen him; but he was still an enigma and a marvel.  The living face did not expound the past, any more than the portrait portended the future.  He was still a mystery and a vision; and thinking of these things I fell asleep.

Mary Quince, who slept in the dressing-room, the door of which was close to my bed, and lay open to secure me against ghosts, called me up; and the moment I knew where I was I jumped up, and peeped eagerly from the window.  It commanded the avenue and court-yard; but we were many windows removed from that over the hall-door, and immediately beneath ours lay the two giant lime trees, prostrate and uprooted, which I had observed as we drove up the night before.