“Ah, I see,” said Eugenia.  “Something new.”  She had never heard of this form of worship.

Mr. Acton began to laugh, and Gertrude looked anxiously at Mr. Brand.

“You have come very far,” said Mr. Wentworth.

“Very far—­very far,” the Baroness replied, with a graceful shake of her head—­a shake that might have meant many different things.

“That ’s a reason why you ought to settle down with us,” said Mr. Wentworth, with that dryness of utterance which, as Eugenia was too intelligent not to feel, took nothing from the delicacy of his meaning.

She looked at him, and for an instant, in his cold, still face, she seemed to see a far-away likeness to the vaguely remembered image of her mother.  Eugenia was a woman of sudden emotions, and now, unexpectedly, she felt one rising in her heart.  She kept looking round the circle; she knew that there was admiration in all the eyes that were fixed upon her.  She smiled at them all.

“I came to look—­to try—­to ask,” she said.  “It seems to me I have done well.  I am very tired; I want to rest.”  There were tears in her eyes.  The luminous interior, the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious life—­the sense of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering force, and she felt herself yielding to one of the most genuine emotions she had ever known.  “I should like to stay here,” she said.  “Pray take me in.”

Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her eyes.  “My dear niece,” said Mr. Wentworth, softly.  And Charlotte put out her arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton turned away, with his hands stealing into his pockets.

CHAPTER IV

A few days after the Baroness Munster had presented herself to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of which mention has already been made.  It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety.  The discussion went forward, as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame M; auunster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister.  If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment.  This was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence.  The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual