of apartments that the inn could boast of.

In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles with
green shades. Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she
continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the
table. The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance
being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order to
look through them. Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful shape as
she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip
accompanied every downstroke. There were two large antique rings on her
forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards and
forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary one of
the nib upon the paper.

'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'

A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,
knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full
stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not
rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she
raised her eyes.

'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.
'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?'

The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was
the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled
with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once,
had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against
that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own.