“My poor dear child, I should be cruel indeed, if I encouraged you. You are giving yourself up to an enterprise, so shockingly unsuited to a young girl like you, that I declare I contemplate it with horror. Think, I entreat you, think; and let me hear that you have yielded--not to my poor entreaties--but to your own better sense!” His voice faltered; his eyes moistened. “I shall make a fool of myself,” he burst out furiously, “if I stay here any longer. Good-by.” He left her. She walked to the window, and looked out at the fair morning. No one to feel for her--no one to understand her--nothing nearer that could speak to poor mortality of hope and encouragement than the bright heaven, so far away! She turned from the window. “The sun shines on the murderer,” she thought, “as it shines on me.” She sat down at the table, and tried to quiet her mind; to think steadily to some good purpose. Of the few friends that she possessed, every one had declared that she was in the wrong. Had _they_ lost the one loved being of all beings on earth, and lost him by the hand of a homicide--and that homicide free? All that was faithful, all that was devoted in the girl’s nature, held her to her desperate resolution as with a hand of iron. If she shrank at that miserable moment, it was not from her design--it was from the sense of her own helplessness. “Oh, if I had been a man!” she said to herself. “Oh, if I could find a friend!” CHAPTER LIII. THE FRIEND IS FOUND. Mrs. Ellmother looked into the parlor. “I told you Mr. Mirabel would call again,” she announced. “Here he is.” “Has he asked to see me?” “He leaves it entirely to you.” For a moment, and a moment only, Emily was undecided. “Show him in,” she said. Mirabel’s embarrassment was visible the moment he entered the room. For the first time in his life--in the presence of a woman--the popular preacher was shy. He who had taken hundreds of fair hands with sympathetic pressure--he who had offered fluent consolation, abroad and at home, to beauty in distress--was conscious of a rising color, and was absolutely at a loss for words when Emily received him. And yet, though he appeared at disadvantage--and, worse still, though he was aware of it himself--there was nothing contemptible in his look and manner. His silence and confusion revealed a change in him which inspired respect. Love had developed this spoiled darling of foolish congregations, this effeminate pet of drawing-rooms and boudoirs, into the likeness of a Man--and no woman, in Emily’s position, could have failed to see that it was love which she herself had inspired. Equally ill at ease, they both took refuge in the commonplace phrases suggested by the occasion. These exhausted there was a pause. Mirabel alluded to Cecilia, as a means of continuing the conversation. “Have you seen Miss Wyvil?” he inquired.