say to that! The old gentleman would not know himself. But I said how it would be before ever I brought the girls here. There's Hartland for the one, and Jack Stoneby for the other."
Before the evening was over, he was shouting with laughter over a new idea.
"Old Liscard taken with Emily! Lord! O Lord! I shall never get over it! If it really is so, it would be the richest thing I ever knew in my life. And I'll lay any money it is so. I never saw him anything like it before, nor, I'll wager, has any one else. He was making up to her the whole of dinner, talking away like a perfect parrot, and he would not stop ten minutes in the dining-room after they left – Kant and Cicero could not have held him there with cart-ropes, – and to see him, over the piano, beating time and wagging his old head, and they say he is to show them all over his library to-morrow morning, and take them a drive in the afternoon! Oh, my dear Rosamund, what nuts this will be for you! I should say she'd be as glad as I, if anything really does come out of it. Well, he's not such an old boy neither; and he had a sorry time of it with that vixen of a Lady Caroline; he is quite right to chirp up a bit, and have a little pleasure in life yet. Em's the very girl to suit him. To be sure, there are the children; but they are young, and I should say the girls would soon go off. Catharine is not a patch upon Rosamund, but she's well enough. Dolly will be good-looking. Anyway, that's their concern, and I know one thing, I should be uncommonly well pleased. I should die of laughing. It would be the rummest idea. Now, I wonder," more seriously, "I do wonder whether any notion of the kind has struck Hartland. Hartland is such a moony chap that I should not be one bit surprised if he had seen nothing; if it had all passed off like water off a duck's back."
Hartland had, however, seen enough, and more than enough. On his part he had never felt less inclined to laugh in his life.
Here was a fresh complication, with a vengeance.
It was not quite the agreeable jest to him that it was to the lady's brother, that his scholarly and refined relative, hitherto the personification of pedantry and respectability, as to whom there had formerly been but one feeling, that of consideration and goodwill, – it could not be to him quite what it was to Gilbert, to see the elderly widower blossom out into a new character.
Now, it was perfectly true that not only had Mr Liscard conversed incessantly with Emily Gilbert during dinner, but that the most laborious and long-winded instructions, the prosings which even Gilbert when on his promotion had surreptitiously yawned beneath, had been, to all appearance, hearkened to with the profoundest sympathy and interest by Gilbert's sister. The host had been intelligently questioned at due intervals. He had been drawn out, and led on, as it had scarcely ever been his fortune to be encouraged hitherto. Beneath such treatment he had expanded and thriven, as no one could have helped doing.
In the evening, he had joined the ladies far sooner than he had ever before been known to quit the comforts of the well-warmed room and glowing wine-cups. He had made some excuse for doing so certainly, but the excuse had been a slight one, and it had been obvious to all present that the attraction of good company had been
