The Caxtons Part XVIII by Edward Bulwer-lytton

It was at sunset that I stole through the ruined court-yard, having left my chaise at the foot of the hill below. Though they whom I came to seek knew that I had arrived in England, they did not, from my letter, expect me till the next day. I had stolen a march upon them; and now, in spite of all the impatience which had urged me thither, I was afraid to enter, -- afraid to see the change more than ten years had made in those forms for which, in my memory, Time had stood still. And Roland had, even when we parted, grown old before his time. Then my father was in the meridian of life, now he had approached to the decline. And my mother, whom I remembered so fair, as if the freshness of her own heart bad preserved the soft bloom to the cheek, -- I could not bear to think that she was no longer young.

Blanche, too, whom I had left a child, -- Blanche, my constant correspondent during those long years of exile, in letters crossed and recrossed, with all the small details that make the eloquence of letter-writing, so that in those epistles I had seen her mind gradually grow up in harmony with the very characters, at first vague and infantine, then somewhat stiff with the first graces of running-hand, then dashing off free and facile; and for the last year before I left, so formed yet so airy, so regular yet so unconscious of effort, though in truth, as the calligraphy had become thus matured, I had been half vexed and half pleased to perceive a certain reserve creeping over the style, -- wishes for my return less expressed from herself than as messages from others, words of the old child-like familiarity repressed, and "Dearest Sisty" abandoned for the cold form of "Dear Cousin."