arriage to Anne Silvester was to be put to the proof.

Toward two o'clock in the afternoon Blanche and her step-mother entered
the drawing-room of Lady Lundie's town house in Portland Place.

Since the previous evening the weather had altered for the worse. The
rain, which had set in from an early hour that morning, still fell.
Viewed from the drawing-room windows, the desolation of Portland Place
in the dead season wore its aspect of deepest gloom. The dreary opposite
houses were all shut up; the black mud was inches deep in the roadway;
the soot, floating in tiny black particles, mixed with the falling rain,
and heightened the dirty obscurity of the rising mist. Foot-passengers
and vehicles, succeeding each other at rare intervals, left great gaps
of silence absolutely uninterrupted by sound. Even the grinders of
organs were mute; and the wandering dogs of the street were too wet to
bark. Looking back from the view out of Lady Lundie's state windows
to the view in Lady Lundie's state room, the melancholy that reigned
without was more than matched by the melancholy that reigned within.
The house had been shut up for the season: it had not been considered
necessary, during its mistress's brief visit, to disturb the existing
state of things. Coverings of dim brown hue shrouded the furniture.
The chandeliers hung invisible in enormous bags. The silent clocks
hibernated under extinguishers dropped over them two months since. The
tables, drawn up in corners--loaded with ornaments at other times--had
nothing but pen, ink, and paper (suggestive of the coming proceedings)
placed on them now. The smell of the house was musty; the voice of the
house was still. One melancholy maid haunted the bedrooms up stairs,
like a ghost. One melancholy man, appointed to admit the visitors, sat
solitary in the lower regions--the last of the flunkies, mouldering
in an extinct servants' hall. Not a word passed, in the drawing-room,
between Lady Lundie and Blanche. Each waited the appearance of the
persons concerned in the coming inquiry, absorbed in her own thoughts.
Their situation at the moment was a solemn burlesque of the situation
of two ladies who are giving an evening party, and who are waiting to
receive their guests. Did neither of them see this? Or, seeing it, did
they shrink from acknowledging it? In similar positions, who does not
shrink? The occasions are many on which we have excellent reason to
laugh when the tears are in our eye