The Rector drew a long breath. He was not glad--oh no!--to think that his sister was in trouble: but nothing that affected her could be so serious, he felt, as if it had been something about Jim. He drew forward a chair near himself for her. He had always been both fond and proud of Emily. Perhaps the fact that she was Lady William (though he knew the marriage had not been a success) added a little to the feeling that she was a being by herself, not to be compared with any one else. But still, a great deal of it was very genuine, and meant a conviction that he knew nobody comparable to Emily. He was pleased that she should consult him on her own affairs, of which, generally, she said very little. She had thrown away almost all her own money upon Reginald--provided only that she did not mean to tell him that scapegrace was coming back to trouble his respectable connections again! Thus the same idea that had disturbed his wife occurred to the Rector, both terrors, no doubt, arising from the fact that neither could imagine what Lady William could wish to consult the Rector about. ‘My affairs,’ she said, with a faint smile, as she got her breath, ‘haven’t for a long time been very troublesome to my family, James. I hope they are not entering now into a new stage.’ ‘A new stage?’ he said, and the Rector’s middle-aged heart actually took a jump again. What could it all mean? Good heavens!--Emily’s affairs in a new stage! What could she be going to do? It could not be about any change in her life that she was going to consult him. Change in her life! That was what people said when somebody was going to marry. He looked at his sister with sudden alarm. Emily marry! Vague things he had heard said of Leo Swinford and jests about Lady William’s attractions, started up in his mind. It rarely happens, I think, that a man likes his sister (if she is not dependent upon him) to compromise her dignity by a second marriage. He did not like to think that Emily might intend to come down from her pedestal and show herself a mere common person, like the rest. ‘What do you mean by a new stage?’ he said, with a pucker in his brow. ‘You are very well as you are, and occupy a very good position, and all that. I don’t see what need there is for a new stage.’ ‘Nor I,’ she said; ‘and I hope you will continue of the same opinion when I tell you. I knew,’ she continued, with a little hot colour flushing across her face, ‘that the coming of the Swinfords would upset all our tranquillity. I was sure of it. She is a woman of evil omen wherever she appears.’ ‘Yet you were once very fond of her, if I remember right.’ ‘When I was a girl, and she petted me, and made much of me--I was going to say for her own ends; but I hope it was not for her own ends from the beginning--that would be too diabolical.’