Muriel also gave him her hand, Wentworth his rather distantly, though he smiled, and Emily bent her head with a sumptuous negative politeness, without rising from her chair. In a minute or so, the good Fernando was seated, and gazing at them with opaque glittering eyes which restlessly flickered and seemed not so much to look at them, as toward them. He began to feel, magnetically, that there was something mysterious and menacing in their manner, and his plump, colorless, morbid face grew marble-cool and immobile, with the lips a little parted and rigid, as the lips usually are when there is an attempt at the concealment of emotion or purpose. “Well, Fernando, have you heard the news,” said Wentworth, alluding to Harrington and Muriel’s marriage. “No,” drawled Witherlee, with a face discharged of all expression. “What is it?” “Haven’t you seen the papers this morning?” said Wentworth. “No; I rose rather late this morning,” was the equable answer, “and didn’t breakfast at home. I went down to Parker’s and had a lunch with a bottle of Sotairne, and it never occurred to me to glance at the paper. What is the news?” Wentworth paused a moment, conscious that Witherlee had not heard of the marriage, and filled with an amused disgust, especially at the affected drawl with which the young fop had pronounced the word Sauterne, and generally at his ostentatious and unnecessary mention of his epicurean breakfast. “The news is,” replied Wentworth, changing his intention, “that Emily and I are engaged to be married in October.” Witherlee looked at him for a moment with his eyes more opaque, his lips more rigid, his face more expressionless than before, and slightly lifted his handsome eyebrows; then smiled with immense cordiality. “I am _very_ glad to hear it,” he exclaimed, with tender _empressement_, “very glad indeed. But you surprise me. I hadn’t the remotest idea that such a thing would happen”— “And you didn’t mean it should, if you could help it,” interrupted Emily, with bland tranquillity. Witherlee looked at her with an astonishment so admirably counterfeited, that she almost thought it genuine, and her heart faltered in its purpose. Wentworth, with a strong disposition to laugh, bit his lip, and looked at the floor. Muriel wore an air of sunny laziness, and Harrington, sitting a little apart, kept his searching blue eyes fixed intently on Witherlee’s countenance, unnoticed by him. “Why, Emily,” said Fernando, slowly, after a long pause, “what do you mean! If I could help it? Why how could I hinder it, even if I wished to? How could I be supposed to know anything about it?” “You knew Richard and I loved each other,” stammered Emily, losing her self-possession as she thought how intangible was all her evidence against her colloquist. “You knew it, and you tried to prejudice me against him.”