strange thought came to her, and swiftly, almost guiltily, she stole
across, and drawing back a corner of the blind, examined closely her own
features in the glass, comparing them with the face of the dead woman,
thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living. Joan
drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. There could be no
misreading the evidence. Death had smoothed away the lines, given back
youth. It was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. It might have
been her drowned sister lying there. And they had never known one
another. Had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart? Why
did it imprison us each one as in a moving cell, so that we never could
stretch out our arms to one another, except when at rare intervals Love
or Death would unlock for a while the key? Impossible that two beings
should have been so alike in feature without being more or less alike in
thought and feeling. Whose fault had it been? Surely her own; she was
so hideously calculating. Even Mrs. Munday, because the old lady had
been fond of her and had shown it, had been of more service to her, more
a companion, had been nearer to her than her own mother. In self-excuse
she recalled the two or three occasions when she had tried to win her
mother. But fate seemed to have decreed that their moods should never
correspond. Her mother's sudden fierce outbursts of love, when she would
be jealous, exacting, almost cruel, had frightened her when she was a
child, and later on had bored her. Other daughters would have shown
patience, unselfishness, but she had always been so self-centred. Why
had she never fallen in love like other girls? There had been a boy at
Brighton when she was at school there--quite a nice boy, who had written
her wildly extravagant love-letters. It must have cost him half his
pocket-money to get them smuggled in to her. Why had she only been
amused at them? They might have been beautiful if only one had read them
with sympathy. One day he had caught her alone on the Downs. Evidently
he had made it his business to hang about every day waiting for some such