id Kate. "Go on. You have prepared us for
something incredible."

"You will think it so," said Malbone. "Emilia is engaged to Mr. John
Lambert." And he went out of the room.

"Good Heavens!" said Aunt Jane, taking off her spectacles. "What a man!
He is ugly enough to frighten the neighboring crows. His face looks as
if it had fallen together out of chaos, and the features had come where
it had pleased Fate. There is a look of industrious nothingness about
him, such as busy dogs have. I know the whole family. They used to bake
our bread."

"I suppose they are good and sensible," said Kate.

"Like boiled potatoes, my dear," was the response,--"wholesome but
perfectly uninteresting."

"Is he of that sort?" asked Kate.

"No," said her aunt; "not uninteresting, but ungracious. But I like an
ungracious man better than one like Philip, who hangs over young girls
like a soft-hearted avalanche. This Lambert will govern Emilia, which is
what she needs."

"She will never love him," said Kate, "which is the one thing she needs.
There is nothing that could not be done with Emilia by any person with
whom she was in love; and nothing can ever be done with her by anybody
else. No good will ever come of this, and I hope she will never marry
him."

With this unusual burst, Kate retreated to Hope. Hope took the news more
patiently than any one, but with deep solicitude. A worldly marriage
seemed the natural result of the Ingleside influence, but it had not
occurred to anybody that it would come so soon. It had not seemed
Emilia's peculiar temptation; and yet nobody could suppose that she
looked at John Lambert through any glamour of the affections.

Mr. John Lambert was a millionnaire, a politician, and a widower. The
late Mrs. Lambert had been a specimen of that cheerful hopelessness of
temperament that one finds abundantly developed among the middle-aged
women of country towns. She enjoyed her daily murders in the newspapers,
and wept profusely at the funerals of strangers. On every occasion,
however felicitous, she offered her condolences in a feeble voice, that
seemed to have been washed a great many times and to have faded. But she
was a good manager, a devoted wife, and was more cheerful at home than
elsewhere, for she had there plenty of trials to exercise her eloquence,
and not enough joy to make it her duty to be doleful. At last her poor,
meek, fatiguing voice faded out altogether, and her husband mourned
her as hear