CHAPTER XLIX.
THORNWICK.
It was almost with bewilderment that Mrs.Helmer revisited Thornwick.
The near past seemed to have vanished like a dream that leaves a sorrow behind it, and the far past to take its place.

She had never been accustomed to reflect on her own feelings; things came, were welcome or unwelcome, proved better or worse than she had anticipated, passed away, and were mostly forgotten.

With plenty of faculty, Letty had not yet emerged from the chrysalid condition; she lived much as one in a dream, with whose dream mingle sounds and glimmers from the waking world.

Very few of us are awake, very few even alive in true, availing sense.

"Pooh! what stuff!" says the sleeper, and will say it until the waking begins to come.
On the threshold of her old home, then, Letty found her old self awaiting her; she crossed it, and was once more just Letty, a Letty wrapped in the garments of sorrow, and with a heaviness at the heart, but far from such a miserable Letty as during the last of her former life there.