It was at sunset that I stole through the ruined court-yard, having left
my chaise at the foot of the hill below. Though they whom I came to seek
knew that I had arrived in England, they did not, from my letter, expect
me till the next day. I had stolen a march upon them; and now, in spite
of all the impatience which had urged me thither, I was afraid to enter,
--afraid to see the change more than ten years had made in those forms for
which, in my memory, Time had stood still. And Roland had, even when we
parted, grown old before his time. Then my father was in the meridian of
life, now he had approached to the decline. And my mother, whom I
remembered so fair, as if the freshness of her own heart bad preserved
the soft bloom to the cheek,--I could not bear to think that she was no
longer young. Blanche, too, whom I had left a child,--Blanche, my
constant correspondent during those long years of exile, in letters
crossed and recrossed, with all the small details that make the eloquence
of letter-writing, so that in those epistles I had seen her mind
gradually grow up in harmony with the very characters, at first vague and
infantine, then somewhat stiff with the first graces of running-hand,
then dashing off free and facile; and for the last year before I left, so
formed yet so airy, so regular yet so unconscious of effort, though in
truth, as the calligraphy had become thus matured, I had been half vexed
and half pleased to perceive a certain reserve creeping over the style,--
wishes for my return less expressed from herself than as messages from
others, words of the old child-like familiarity repressed, and "Dearest
Sisty" abandoned for the cold form of "Dear Cousin." Those letters,
coming to me in a spot where maiden and love had been as myths of the
bygone, phantasms and eidola only vouchsafed to the visions of fancy, had
by little and little crept into secret corners of my heart; and out of
the wrecks of a former romance, solitude and revery had gone far to build
up the fairy domes of a romance yet to come. My mother's letters had
never omitted to make mention of Blanche,--of her forethought and tender