She did not know that Eglington, standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.
Below, at the desk where Eglington's mother used to write, Hylda sat with a bundle of letters before her.

For some moments she opened, glanced through them, and put them aside.

Presently she sat back in her chair, thinking--her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess; and somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late Countess's diary: "Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me ?" Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets.

Her hand came upon a letter.

This had remained when the others had been taken out.