At this moment Emma was standing by Colonel Mordaunt, who involuntarily caught her hand and pressed it eagerly; but tried to disguise his motives by suddenly seating her in a chair behind her, saying, 'You had better sit down; I am sure you must be tired with standing so long.'
'No; really, Emma,' cried Major Douglas, 'you go too far there; though to be sure, if by seeing and conversing with Miss Mowbray you could have convinced her of her errors, I should not have objected to your seeing her once more or so.'
'Surely,' said Mrs Douglas timidly, 'we ought, my love, to have repeated our visits till we had made a convert of her.'
'A convert of her!' exclaimed Mr Maynard's sisters, 'a convert of a kept mistress!' bursting into a violent laugh, which had a most painful effect on the irritable nerves of Colonel Mordaunt, whose tongue, parched with emotion, cleaved to the roof of his mouth whenever he attempted to speak.
'Pray, to what other circumstance, yet untold, do you allude?' said Mr Davenport.
'Oh, we too had a rencontre with the philosopher and his charming friend,' said Major Douglas, 'and—but, Emma, do you tell the story.—'Sdeath!—Poor fellow!—Well, but we parted good friends,' added the kind-hearted Caledonian, dispersing a tear; while Emma, in simple but impressive language, related all that passed at Perpignan between themselves, Adeline, and Glenmurray; and concluded with saying, that, 'from the almost idolatrous respect with which Glenmurray spoke and apparently thought of Adeline, and from the account of her conduct and its motives, which he so fully detailed, she was convinced that, so far from being influenced by depravity in connecting herself with Glenmurray, Adeline was the victim of a romantic, absurd, and false conception of virtue; and she should have thought it her duty to have endeavoured, assisted by her sister, to have prevailed on her to renounce her opinions, and, by becoming the wife of Glenmurray, to restore to the society of her own sex, a woman formed to be its ornament and its example. 'Poor thing!' she added in a faltering voice, 'would that I knew her fate!'
'I can guess it, I tell you,' said Mrs Wallington.
'We had better drop the subject, madam,' replied Emma Douglas indignantly, 'as it is one that we shall never agree upon. If I supposed Miss Mowbray happy, I should feel for her, and feel interest sufficient in her fate to make me combat your prejudices concerning her; but now that she is perhaps afflicted, poor, friendless, and scorned, though unjustly, by every "virtuous she that knows her story," I cannot command my feelings when she is named with sarcastic respect, nor can I bear to hear an unhappy woman supposed to be plunged in the lowest depths of vice, whom I, on the contrary, believe to be at this moment atoning for the error of her judgment by a life of lonely penitence, or sunk perhaps already in the grave, the victim of a broken heart.'
Colonel Mordaunt, affected and delighted, hung on Emma Douglas's words with breathless attention, resolving when she had ended her narration to begin his, and clear Adeline from the calumnies of Mrs Wallington and Miss Maynard: but after articulating with some difficulty—'Ladies,—I—Miss Douglas,—I—' he found that his feelings would not allow him to proceed: therefore, suddenly raising Emma's hand to his lips, imprinted on it a kiss, at once fervent and respectful, and, making a hasty bow, ran out of the house.
Every one was astonished; but none so much as Emma Douglas.