`Don't you remember my telling you, when we last met, that I was going to Cumberland? I have been in Cumberland ever since -- I have been staying all the time at Limmeridge House.'

`At Limmeridge House!' Her pale face brightened as she repeated the words, her wandering eyes fixed on me with a sudden interest. `Ah, how happy you must have been!' she said, looking at me eagerly, without a shadow of its former distrust left in her expression.

I took advantage of her newly-aroused confidence in me to observe her face, with an attention and a curiosity which I had hitherto restrained myself from showing, for caution's sake. I looked at her, with my mind full of that other lovely face which had so ominously recalled her to my memory on the terrace by moonlight. I had seen Anne Catherick's likeness in Miss Fairlie. I now saw Miss Fairlie's likeness in Anne Catherick -- saw it all the more clearly because the points of dissimilarity between the two were presented to me as well as the points of resemblance. In the general outline of the countenance and general proportion of the features -- in the colour of the hair and in the little nervous uncertainty about the lips -- in the height and size of the figure, and the carriage of the head and body, the likeness appeared even more startling than I had ever felt it to be yet. But there the resemblance ended, and the dissimilarity, in details, began. The delicate beauty of Miss Fairlie's complexion, the transparent clearness of her eyes, the smooth purity of her skin, the tender bloom of colour on her lips, were all missing from the worn weary face that was now turned towards mine. Although I hated myself even for thinking such a thing, still, while I looked at the woman before me, the idea would force itself into my mind that one sad change, in the future, was all that was wanting to make the likeness complete, which I now saw to be so imperfect in detail. If ever sorrow and suffering set their profaning marks on the youth and beauty of Miss Fairlie's face, then, and then only, Anne Catherick and she would be the twin-sisters of chance resemblance, the living reflections of one another.

I shuddered at the thought. Mere was something horrible in the blind unreasoning distrust of the future which the mere passage of it through my mind seemed to imply. It was a welcome interruption to be roused by feeling Anne Catherick's hand laid on my shoulder. The touch was as stealthy and as sudden as that other touch which had petrified me from head to foot on the night when we first met.

`You are looking at me, and you are thinking of something,' she said, with her strange breathless rapidity of utterance. `What is it?'

`Nothing extraordinary,' I answered. `I was only wondering how you came here.'

`I came with a friend who is very good to me. I have only been here two days.'

`And you found your way to this place yesterday?'

`How do you know that?'

`I only guessed it.'

She turned from me, and knelt down before the inscription once more.

`Where should I go if not here?' she said. `The friend who was better than a mother to me is the only friend I have to visit at Limmeridge. Oh, it makes my heart ache to see a stain on her tomb! It ought to be kept white as snow, for her sake. I was tempted to begin cleaning it yesterday, and I can't help coming back to go on with it today. Is there anything wrong in that? I hope not. Surely nothing can be wrong that I do for Mrs Fairlie's sake?'

The old grateful sense of her benefactress's kindness was evidently the ruling idea still in the Poor creature's mind -- the narrow mind which had but too plainly opened to no other lasting impression since that first impression of her younger and happier days. I saw that my best chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to