call you away?" she asked, and Emilia
gave him a steady look.

"I fear I cannot remain here. Will you excuse me?"

His face spoke plainly now of mental torture repressed. Georgiana put
her hand out in full sympathy, and Emilia said, in her deep whisper,
"Let me hear to-morrow." Then they bowed. Wilfrid was in the street
again.

"Thank God, I've seen her!" was his first thought, overhearing "What did
she think of me?" as he sighed with relief at his escape. For, lo! the
Branciani dress was not on her shoulders, and therefore he might imagine
what he pleased:--that she had arrayed herself so during the day to
delight his eyes; or that, he having seen her in it, she had determined
none others should. Though feeling utterly humiliated, he was yet happy.
Driving to the station, he perceived starlight overhead, and blessed it;
while his hand waved busily to conduct a current of fresh, oblivious air
to his nostrils. The quiet heavens seemed all crowding to look down on
the quiet circle of the firs, where Emilia's harp had first been 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, bit