Nora fixed her eyes on him, with a kind of unfathomable gentleness. “You are engaged, you were engaged? How strangely you talk about giving her up! Give her my compliments!” It seemed, however, that Nora was to have the chance of offering her compliments personally. The door was thrown open and admitted two ladies whom Nora vaguely remembered to have seen. In a moment she recognized them as the persons whom, on the evening she had gone to hear Hubert preach, he had left her, after the sermon, to conduct to their carriage. The younger one was decidedly pretty, in spite of a nose a trifle too aquiline. A pair of imperious dark eyes, as bright as the diamond which glittered in each of her ears, and a nervous, capricious rapidity of motion and gesture, gave her an air of girlish brusquerie, which was by no means without charm. Her mother’s aspect, however, testified to its being as well to enjoy this charm at a distance. She was a stout, coarse-featured, good-natured woman, with a jaded, submissive expression, and seemed to proclaim by a certain ponderous docility, as she followed in her daughter’s wake, the subserviency of matter to mind. Both ladies were dressed to the uttermost limit of opportunity. They came into the room staring frankly at Nora, and overlooking Hubert, with a gracious implication of his being already one of the family. The situation was a trying one, but he faced it as he might.
“This is Miss Lambert,” he said gravely; and then with an effort to dissipate embarrassment by a jest, waving his hand toward his portrait, “This is the Reverend Hubert Lawrence!”
The elder lady moved toward the picture, but the other came straight to Nora. “I have seen you before!” she cried defiantly, and with defiance in her pretty eyes. “And I have heard of you too! Yes, you are certainly very handsome. But pray, what are you doing here?”
“My dear child!” said Hubert, imploringly, and with a burning side-glance at Nora. The world seemed to him certainly very cruel.
“My dear Hubert,” said the young lady, “what is she doing here? I have a right to know. Have you come running after him even here? You are a wicked girl. You have done me a wrong. You have tried to turn him away from me. You kept him in Boston for weeks, when he ought to have been here; when I was writing to him day after day to come. I heard all about it! I don’t know what is the matter with you. I thought you were so very well off! You look very poor and unhappy, but I must say what I think!”
“My own darling, be reasonable!” murmured her mother. “Come and look at this beautiful picture. There’s no deceit in that noble face!”
Nora smiled charitably. “Don’t attack me,” she said. “If I ever wronged you, I was quite unconscious of it, and I beg your pardon now.”
“Nora,” murmured Hubert, piteously, “spare me!”
“Ah, does he call you Nora?” cried the young lady. “The harm’s done, madam! He will never be what he was. You have changed, Hubert!” And she turned passionately upon her intended. “You know you have! You talk to me, but you think of her. And what is the meaning of this visit? You are both strangely excited; what have you been talking about?”
“Mr. Lawrence has been telling me about you,” said Nora: “how pretty, how charming, how gentle you are!”