asked Eugenia.

"I am a Unitarian, madam," replied Mr. Brand, impressively.

"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