re Arundel.

The family were living in a convenient suite of small rooms on the
ground-floor, called the winter-rooms so dinner was announced by the
doors of an adjoining chamber being thrown open, and there they saw, in
the midst of a chamber hung with green silk and adorned with some fine
cabinet-pictures, a small round table, bright and glowing.

It was a lively dinner. Lord St. Jerome loved conversation, though he
never conversed. "There must be an audience," he would say, "and I am
the audience." The partner of his life, whom he never ceased admiring,
had originally fascinated him by her conversational talents; and, even
if Nature had not impelled her, Lady St. Jerome was too wise a woman
to relinquish the spell. The monsignore could always, when necessary,
sparkle with anecdote or blaze with repartee; and all the chaplains, who
abounded in this house, were men of bright abilities, not merely men of
reading, but of the world, learned in the world's ways, and trained to
govern mankind by versatility of their sympathies. It was a dinner where
there could not be two conversations going on, and where even the silent
take their share in the talk by their sympathy.

And among the silent, as silent even as Lord St. Jerome, was Miss
Arundel; and yet her large violet eyes, darker even than her dark-brown
hair, and gleaming with intelligence, and her rich face mantling with
emotion, proved she was not insensible to the witty passages and the
bright and interesting narratives that were sparkling and flowing about
her.

The gentlemen left the dining-room with the ladies, in the Continental
manner. Lady St. Jerome, who was leaning on the arm of the monsignore,
guided him into a saloon farther than the one they had reentered, and
then seating herself said, "You were telling me about Scotland, that you
yourself thought it ripe."

"Unquestionably. The original plan was to have established our hierarchy
when the Kirk split up; but that would have been a mistake, it was not
then ripe. There would have been a fanatical reaction. There is always
a tendency that way in Scotland: as it is, at this moment, the
Establishment and the Free Kirk are mutually sighing for some compromise
which may bring them together and, if the proprietors would give up
their petty patronage, some flatter themselves it might be arranged. But
we are thoroughly well informed, and have provided for all this. We sent
two of our best men into Scotland some ti