“Emily thinks it a pointed thing, my coming at once,” he cogitated.  “She reminds me, too, that friendship for her did not bring me.  Well, I was too much out of spirits to come a month ago.”

Emily’s eyes flashed and softened when she saw him out of countenance, and a little twist came in her lips where a smile would like to have broken through.  She was still in crape, and wore the delicate gossamer of her widow’s cap, with long, wing-like streamers falling away at her back; and while she sat at work on a cumbersome knitted shawl she listened with an air of docility to Justina’s conversation, without noticing that a touch of dismay was beginning to show itself in John’s face; for Miss Fairbairn had begun to speak of Italian literature, a subject she had been getting up lately for certain good reasons of her own.  She dared to talk about Dante, and John was almost at once keenly aware that all this learning was sham—­it was the outcome of no real taste; and he felt like a fool while one of the ladies did the wooing and the other, as he thought, amused herself with watching it.  He was accustomed to be wooed, and to be watched, but he had been trying for some time to bring his mind to like the present wooer.  While away from her he fancied that he had begun to succeed, and now he knew well that this sort of talk would drive him wild in a week.  It represented nothing real.  No; the thing would not do.  She was a good woman; she would have ruled his house well; she would have been just to his children; and if he had established her in all comfort and elegance over his family, he might have left her, and attended to those prospective Parliamentary duties as long as he liked, without annoying her.  She was a lady too, and her mother, old Lady Fairbairn, was a pleasant and unexceptionable woman.  But she was making herself ridiculous now.  No; it would not do.

Giving her up then and there, he suddenly started from his seat as if he felt relieved, and drawing himself to his full height, looked down on the two ladies, one of whom, lifting her golden head, continued the wooing with her eyes, while the other said carelessly and with a dispassionate air—­

“Well, I cannot think how you or John or any one can like that bitter-hearted, odious, cruel Dante.”

“Emily,” exclaimed Miss Fairbairn, “how can you be so absurd, dear?”

“I wonder they did not tear him into little bits,” continued Emily audaciously, “instead of merely banishing him, which was all they did—­wasn’t it, John?”

“I cannot imagine what you mean,” exclaimed Miss Fairbairn, while John laughed, and felt that at least here was something real and natural.

“You cannot?  That’s because you don’t consider, then, what we should feel if somebody now were to write a grand poem about our fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, and dear friends deceased, setting forth how he had seen them all in the nether regions; how he had received their confidences, and how penitent most of them were.  Persecuted, indeed! and misunderstood!  I consider that his was the deadliest revenge any man ever took upon his enemies.”