effectually by her than the narrative they were required to fill out.
And as the confidants to whom she had repeated that narrative were more
loyal to her than she herself had been to its first narrator, it
remained altogether unknown to the household at the Towers; and, indeed,
to anyone who could by repeating it have excited suspicion of the
twinship of the farmer's widow at Chorlton-under-Bradbury and the old
lady whom her young ladyship's eccentricities had brought from London.

Apart from their close contiguity, nothing occurred for some time to
make mutual recognition more probable than it had been at any moment
since Dave's visit to Chorlton had disclosed to each the bare fact of
the other's existence. They were within five miles of one another, and
neither knew it; nor had either a thought of the other but as a memory
of long ago; still cherished, as a sepulchral stone cherishes what Time
leaves legible, while his slow hand makes each letter fainter day by
day.

And yet--how near they went on one occasion to what must have led to
recognition, had the period of their separation been less cruelly long,
and its strange conditions less baffling! How near, for instance, three
or four days after old Maisie's arrival at the Towers, when Gwen the
omnipotent decided that she would take Mrs. Picture for a long drive in
the best part of the day--the longest drive that would not tire her to
death!

Whether the old soul that her young ladyship had taken such a fancy
to--that was how Blencorn the coachman and Benjamin the coachboy thought
of her--really enjoyed the strange experience of gliding over smooth
roads flanked by matchless woodlands or primeval moorland; cropless
Autumn fields or pastures of contented cattle; through villages of the
same mind about the undesirableness of change that had been their creed
for centuries, with churches unconscious of judicious restoration and an
unflawed record of curfews; by farms with all the usual besetting sins
of farms, black duck-slush and uncaptivating dung-heaps; cattle no
persuasion weighs with; the same hen that never stops the same
dissertation on the same egg, the same cock that has some of the vices
of his betters, our male selves to wit--whether the said old soul really
enjoyed all this, who can say? She may have been pretending to satisfy
her young ladyship. If so, she succeeded very well, considering her
years. But it was all part of a dream to her.

In that dream,