was curiously graceful.  Emily remembered having read novels whose heroines were described as “undulating.”  Mrs. Osborn was undulating.  Her long, drooping, and dense black eyes were quite unlike other girls’ eyes.  Emily had never seen anything like them.  And she had such a lonely, slow, shy way of lifting them to look at people.  She was obliged to look up at tall Emily.  She seemed a schoolgirl as she stood near her.  Emily was the kind of mistaken creature whose conscience, awakening to unnecessary remorses, causes its owner at once to assume all the burdens which Fate has laid upon the shoulders of others.  She began to feel like a criminal herself, irrespective of the shape of her skull.  Her own inordinate happiness and fortune had robbed this unoffending young couple.  She wished that it had not been so, and vaguely reproached herself without reasoning the matter out to a conclusion.  At all events, she was remorsefully sympathetic in her mental attitude towards Mrs. Osborn, and being sure that she was frightened of her husband’s august relative, felt nervous herself because Lord Walderhurst bore himself with undated courtesy and kept his monocle fixed in his eye throughout the interview.  If he had let it drop and allowed it to dangle in an unbiassed manner from its cord, Emily would have felt more comfortable, because she was sure his demeanour would have appeared a degree more encouraging to the Osborns.

“Are you glad to be in England again?” she asked Mrs. Osborn.

“I never was here before,” answered the young woman.  “I have never been anywhere but in India.”

In the course of the conversation she explained that she had not been a delicate child, and also conveyed that even if she had been one, her people could not have afforded to send her home.  Instinct revealed to Emily that she had not had many of the good things of life, and that she was not a creature of buoyant spirits.  The fact that she had spent a good many hours of most of her young days in reflecting on her ill-luck had left its traces on her face, particularly in the depths of her slow-moving, black eyes.

They had come, it appeared, in the course of duty, to pay their respects to the woman who was to be their destruction.  To have neglected to do so would have made them seem to assume an indiscreet attitude towards the marriage.

“They can’t like it, of course,” Lady Maria summed them up afterwards, “but they have made up their minds to lump it as respectably as possible.”

“I am so sorry for them,” said Emily.

“Of course you are.  And you will probably show them all sorts of indiscreet kindnesses, but don’t be too altruistic, my good Emily.  The man is odious, and the girl looks like a native beauty.  She rather frightens me.”

“I don’t think Captain Osborn is odious,” Emily answered.  “And she is pretty, you know.  She is frightened of us, really.”