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CHAPTER XXIII

Esther’s Narrative

We came home from Mr. Boythorn’s after six pleasant
weeks. We were often in the park and in the woods and sel-
dom passed the lodge where we had taken shelter without
looking in to speak to the keeper’s wife; but we saw no more
of Lady Dedlock, except at church on Sundays. There was
company at Chesney Wold; and although several beautiful
faces surrounded her, her face retained the same influence
on me as at first. I do not quite know even now whether it
was painful or pleasurable, whether it drew me towards her
or made me shrink from her. I think I admired her with a
kind of fear, and I know that in her presence my thoughts
always wandered back, as they had done at first, to that old
time of my life.
I had a fancy, on more than one of these Sundays, that
what this lady so curiously was to me, I was to her—I mean
that I disturbed her thoughts as she influenced mine, though
in some different way. But when I stole a glance at her and
saw her so composed and distant and unapproachable, I felt
this to be a foolish weakness. Indeed, I felt the whole state
of my mind in reference to her to be weak and unreason-

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