“I hope you will find her here:”  Georgiana hurried her steps.  “Say anything to comfort her.  I will have her with me, and try and teach her what self-control means, and how it is to be won.  If ever she can act on the stage as she spoke to-night, she will be a great dramatic genius.  She was transformed.  She uses strange forcible expressions that one does not hear in every-day life.  She crushed Charlotte as if she had taken her up in one hand, and without any display at all:  no gesture, or spasm.  I noticed, as they stood together, that there is such a contrast between animal courage and imaginative fire.”

“Charlotte could meet a great occasion, I should think,” said Merthyr; and, taking his sister by the elbow:  “You speak as if you had observed very coolly.  Did Emilia leave you so cold?  Did she seem to speak from head, not from heart?”

“No; she moved me—­poor child!  Only, how humiliating to hear her beg for love!—­before us.”

Merthyr smiled:  “I thought it must be the woman’s feeling that would interfere to stop a natural emotion.  Is it true—­or did I not see that certain eyes were red just now?”

“That was for him,” said Georgiana, hastily.  “I am sure that no man has stood in such a position as he did.  To see a man made publicly ashamed, and bearing it.  I have never had to endure so painful a sight.”

“To stand between two women, claimed by both, like Solomon’s babe!  A man might as well at once have Solomon’s judgement put into execution upon him.  You wept for him!  Do you know, Georgey, that charity of your sex, which makes you cry at any ‘affecting situation,’ must have been designed to compensate to us for the severities of Providence.”

“No, Merthyr;” she arrested his raillery.  “Do I ever cry?  But I thought—­if it had been my brother! and almost at the thought I felt the tears rush at my eyelids, as if the shame had been mine.”

“The probability of its not being your brother seemed distant at the moment,” said Merthyr, with his half-melancholy smile.  “Tell me—­I can conjure up the scene:  but tell me whether you saw more passions than one in her face?”

“Emilia’s?  No.  Her face reminded me of the sombre—­that dull glow of a fire that you leave burning in the grate late on winter nights.  Was that natural?  It struck me that her dramatic instinct was as much alive as her passion.”

“Had she been clumsy, would you not have been less suspicious of her?  And if she had only shown the accustomed northern retenue, and merely looked all that she had to say ’preserved her dignity’—­our womanly critic would have been completely satisfied.”

“But, Merthyr, to parade her feelings, and then to go on appealing!”

“On the principle that she ought to be ashamed of them, she was wrong.”

“If you had heard her utter abandonment!”

“I can believe that she did not blush.”

“It seems to me to belong to those excesses that prompt—­that are in themselves a species of suicide.”