“My poor sister, to be so insulted! A hired companion! and she was a Rossiter! Oh, I cannot bear it, my poor disgraced nieces, my heart is breaking for you.” “But, Aunt Christine, he says she is a lady, the daughter of a clergyman,” Emma said, soothingly,—hers the only voice raised in defence of the intruder,—the interloper,—the adventuress,—as Miss Rossiter termed the expected bride. Emma’s heart had throbbed painfully at the thought of a new mother, but it was natural for her to defend whatever she believed abused, and she spoke up for the unknown Edith, until Julia, who had been reading Godfrey’s letter, uttered a cry of bitter anger and scorn, and said, sternly: “Hush, Em, you don’t know what you are talking about; a lady, indeed, and the daughter of a clergyman! A woman of forty, with a limp, and glass eye, and cracked voice, is a nice mother to bring us!” “A wha-at?” Miss Rossiter gasped, while Alice and Emma both exclaimed simultaneously: “A limp and a glass eye! What do you mean? Let me see;” and looking over Julia’s shoulder Alice read aloud what Godfrey had written. Godfrey had said, “The sight of her will take your breath away,” and in fact the very thought of her did that, and for full a minute after the letter was read there was not a sound heard in the room where the indignant and confounded ladies sat, each staring blankly at the other, and neither able to speak or move. Miss Rossiter was the first to stir, and with a moaning cry, “I cannot bear it,” she went into violent hysterics, and Martha was called in, and the poor lady was taken to her room, where she tried, one after another, every bottle of medicine in her closet, but to no effect; even the Crown Bitters failed, and she sank upon the bed, shivering with cold, and asking for shawls and blankets on that August day, with a temperature of ninety degrees in the shade. Perhaps Miss Rossiter herself had not been aware how much Colonel Howard was to her, or how hard it would be to see another woman there in her sister’s place. She had too much sense to believe she would ever fill it, yet the first smart had been that of disappointment and a sense of wrong to herself, while the second was a keen pang of mortification and anger, that if he must choose another he had chosen that caricature on womanhood described so graphically by Godfrey. It is true she did not quite believe him literally. Neither did his sisters, who sat in the library with white faces and tearful eyes. Julia was wrathful and defiant, and was already in a state of fierce rebellion against the woman of forty with the crack in her voice. So much she believed, but the limp and glass eye were too thoroughly Godfrey’s to be trusted.