Her blue eyes looked forth from a face white and delicate as a shell cameo, beneath finely pencilled brows; but they shone now with a new hopefulness--a timid expectancy of happiness; they were no longer pensive and downcast as Peter had known them best.
The future had been shrouded by a heavy mist of hopelessness always--for Lady Mary.

But the fog had lifted, and a fair landscape lay before her.

Not bright, alas! with the brightness and the promise of the morning-time; but yet--there are sunny afternoons; and the landscape was bright still, though long shadows from the past fell across it.
Peter saw only that his mother, for some extraordinary reason, looked many years younger than when he had left her, and that she had exchanged her customary dull, old-fashioned garb for a beautiful and becoming dress.

He gave an involuntary start, and immediately she perceived him.
She stretched out her arms to him with a cry that rang through the rafters of the hall.

The roses were scattered.
"My boy! O God, my darling boy!" In the space of a flash--a second--Lady Mary had seen and understood.
Her arms were round him, and her face hidden upon his empty sleeve.
She was as still as death.