t shockin' way to poor helpless females?"

This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the
Brookfield dining-table. Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and
the matter passed.

He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the
assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in the
world. "You beat us in pace and weight; but you can't skirmish, you can't
manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty," said the
colonel. Wilfrid promised to visit him some day: a fact he denied to
Emilia, when she charged him with it. Her brain seemed to be set on fire
by the presence of an Austrian officer. The miserable belief that she had
abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost appetite,
briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her
cheeks sweet to contemplate. She looked worn, small, wretched: her very
walk indicated self-contempt. Wilfrid was keen to see the change for
which others might have accused a temporary headache. Now that she
appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his
magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him--remember the
constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness,
and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer
life)--his magnanimity, I say, being under this favourable sun, he said
to himself that there should be an end of double-dealing; and, possibly
consoled by feeling a martyr, he persuaded himself to act the gentle
ruffian. To which end, he was again absent from Brookfield, for a space,
and bitterly missed.

Emilia, for the last two Sundays, had taken Mr. Barrett's place at the
organ. She was playing the prelude to one of the evening hymns, when the
lover, whose features she dreaded to be once more forgetting, appeared in
the curtained enclosure. A stoppage in the tune, and a prolonged squeal
of the instrument, gave the congregation below matter to speculate upon.
Wilfrid put up his finger and sat reverently down, while Emilia plunged
tremblingly at the note that was howling its life away. And as she
managed to swim into the stream of the sacred melody again, her head was
turned toward her lover under a new sensation; and the first words she
murmured were, "We have never been in church together, before."

"Not in the evening," he whispered, likewise impressed.

"No," said Emilia softly; flattered by his gre