Eleanor feels uncomfortably guilty. What if they knew that her every thought was wandering to another!
Already she has begun to try and piece the photograph together again, regretting her hasty action in the railway carriage. Before reaching Copthorne she had hidden the fragments safely in a corner of her dressing-bag. She hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry that Philip is coming. It will break the dull monotony of the day. At any rate she will get herself up to look as much like the old Eleanor as possible, though the thought of wandering with him through the haunts of past days is distasteful.
She knows it will please him, however; so, crushing her own feelings, she dons an old dress made by the village dressmaker, one which has hung in her wardrobe ever since she left home, then proceeds to search for the long disused sun bonnet.
The day is almost bright enough to excuse the picturesque headgear, eventually unearthed from the bottom of a tin trunk, and ironed by Eleanor's own hands.
She feels as if she were dressed up for amateur theatricals, and even denies herself the fashionable manner in which her hair is now arranged, going back to the simple style before she knew London or Giddy Mounteagle.
"It certainly is becoming," she says; "beauty unadorned," viewing her charms in this rustic guise before a cracked mirror. "Yet I wonder what the Richmond girls would think of me if I walked on the Terrace, Sunday morning after church, dressed like this?"
She looks so pretty that her heart sinks at the thought that it is Philip, not Carol, for whom she has prepared.
As she comes down the stairs Mrs. Grebby meets her pale and trembling.
"What is the matter, mammy?" asks Eleanor, seeing that her mother is trying to gain breath for speech.
Mrs. Grebby puts her hand to her heart.