heard by
him, and they took her music, charming his blood with imagined harmonies,
as he looked up to them. Thus all the way to Brookfield his fancy soared,
plucked at from below by Alderman's Bouquet.

The Philosopher, up to this point rigidly excluded, rushes forward to the
footlights to explain in a note, that Wilfrid, thus setting a perfume to
contend with a stench, instead of wasting for time, change of raiment,
and the broad lusty airs of heaven to blow him fresh again, symbolizes
the vice of Sentimentalism, and what it is always doing. Enough!

CHAPTER LIV

"Let me hear to-morrow." Wilfrid repeated Emilia's petition in the tone
she had used, and sent a delight through his veins even with that clumsy
effort of imitation. He walked from the railway to Brookfield through the
circle of firs, thinking of some serious tale of home to invent for her
ears to-morrow. Whatever it was, he was able to conclude it--"But all's
right now." He noticed that the dwarf pine, under whose spreading head
his darling sat when he saw her first, had been cut down. Its absence
gave him an ominous chill.

The first sight that saluted him as the door opened, was a pile of Mrs.
Chump's boxes: he listened, and her voice resounded from the library.
Gainsford's eye expressed a discretion significant that there had been an
explosion in the house.

"I sha'nt have to invent much," said Wilfrid to himself, bitterly.

There was a momentary appearance of Adela at the library-door; and over
her shoulder came an outcry from Mrs. Chump. Arabella then spoke: Mr.
Pole and Cornelia following with a word, to which Mrs. Chump responded
shrilly: "Ye shan't talk to 'm, none of ye, till I've had the bloom of
his ear, now!" A confused hubbub of English and Irish ensued. The ladies
drew their brother into the library.

Doubtless you have seen a favourite sketch of the imaginative youthful
artist, who delights to portray scenes on a raft amid the tossing waters,
where sweet and satiny ladies, in a pardonable abandonment to the
exigencies of the occasion, are exhibiting the full energy and activity
of creatures that existed before sentiment was born. The ladies of
Brookfield had almost as utterly cast off their garb of lofty reserve and
inscrutable superiority. They were begging Mrs. Chump to be, for pity's
sake, silent. They were arguing with the woman. They were
remonstrating--to such an extent as this, in reply to an infamous
outburst: "No, no: in