All this time Liddy was kneeling by the chair, kissing her mother’s feeble hands and colourless face. There was no particular alarm about her among them; but she lay floating between life and death for a moment in the extremity of emotion which was too much for her feeble flesh and blood. Then the balance turned--the wrong way. If she died then, how happy for her! but instead she slowly came back, opened her eyes, and returned to life. “Is it a dream?” she said, feebly. “No--my Liddy, my darling, you are real; and the other--wasn’t there another?”
They all sat at breakfast half an hour after like people in a dream. Mrs. Joscelyn sat between her son and daughter, and looked at them alternately, and sipped a feeble cup of tea, and shed a tear or two of pure happiness. She was not strong enough yet to ask any questions; she put her hand now and then on Harry’s arm and patted it softly. She heard the story of how he was found out without understanding it in the least, and echoed feebly her husband’s loud but tremulous laugh at the name his son had taken. “Isaac Oliver--that’s the finest joke I ever heard in my life. Isaac--Oliver! Dang it, but that is the best joke----” And he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks. The young people both sat by with the strangest sense of unreality. To go away across half a world, and then come back again to the same unchanging scene, even to ameliorations of the past which bring out more clearly the astounding difference between it and them--how strange it is! In all Harry’s knowledge of his father, he had never been so friendly or so amiable; but this only made the gentleman-peasant, the yeoman-horsedealer more extraordinary, as a father, to his son. Liddy had a far less shock to sustain in one sense, but a greater in another; for she had come home--and here was her natural place, love and duty and every tradition binding her; but, alas! her heart so far away.
The strange meal was still progressing, the whole family lingering over it; for the household table was a kind of natural centre and place of union; when wheels were heard again, and a carriage stopped at the door. “It will be Joan,” Mrs. Joscelyn said; “she would not lose a moment in coming; and what will she say when she sees--oh, Harry, my boy! She has always had a warm heart for you--the warmest heart for you; we’ll say nothing about old times; but her and me--Run out and meet your sister, Liddy, and say nothing, say nothing--let us see if she will know him.” Mrs. Joscelyn put her hand upon his sleeve. “It’s a pleasure to touch you--I like to touch you in case my eyes should be deceiving me. And did you ever think of your poor mother all these years?”