There was a chastened correctness in the ordinary manner of Denbigh which wore the appearance of the influence of his reason, and a subjection of the passions, that, if anything, gave him less interest with Emily than had it been marked by an evidence of stronger feeling.  But on the present occasion, this objection was removed:  his reading was impressive; he dwelt on those passages which most pleased him with a warmth of eulogium fully equal to her own undisguised sensations.  In the hour occupied in the reading this exquisite little poem, and in commenting on its merits and sentiments, Denbigh gained more on her imagination than in all their former intercourse.  His ideas were as pure, as chastened, and almost as vivid as those of the poet; and Emily listened to his periods with intense attention, as they flowed from him in language as glowing as his ideas.  The poem had been first read to her by her brother, and she was surprised to discover how she had overlooked its beauties on that occasion.  Even John acknowledged that it certainly appeared a different thing now from what he had then thought it; but Emily had taxed his declamatory power in the height of the pheasant season, and, somehow or other, John now imagined that Gertrude was just such a delicate, feminine, warm-hearted domestic girl as Grace Chatterton.  As Denbigh closed the book, and entered into a general conversation with Clara and her sister, John followed Grace to a window, and speaking in a tone of unusual softness for him, he said—­

“Do you know, Miss Chatterton, I have accepted your brother’s invitation to go into Suffolk this summer, and that you are to be plagued with me and my pointers again?”

“Plagued, Mr. Moseley!” said Grace, in a voice even softer than his own.  “I am sure—­I am sure, we none of us think you or your dogs in the least a plague.”

“Ah!  Grace,” and John was about to become what he had never been before—­sentimental—–­ when he saw the carriage of Chatterton, containing the dowager and Catherine entering the parsonage gates.

Pshaw! thought John, there comes Mother Chatterton “Ah!  Grace,” said John, “there are your mother and sister returned already.”

“Already!” said the young lady, and, for the first time in her life, she felt rather unlike a dutiful child.  Five minutes could have made no great difference to her mother, and she would greatly have liked to hear what John Moseley meant to have said; for the alteration in his manner convinced her that his first “ah!  Grace” was to have been continued in a somewhat different language from that in which the second “ah!  Grace” was ended.