"Thank you all the same, papa, for bringing me the paper," said Lucilla. "It would have been a great deal worse if I had not known of it before I saw him. I am sure I am very glad for one thing. He can't be married or dead, as people used to say. I am quite ashamed to keep you so long downstairs, Aunt Jemima, when I know you must be longing for a cup of tea--but it is somebody come back whom nobody expected. Tell him I shall be _so_ glad to see him, papa; though I have no reason to be glad, for he was one of my _young_ friends, you know, and he is sure to think I have gone off." As she spoke, Lucilla turned Aunt Jemima, to whom she had given her arm, quite round, that she might look into the great glass over the mantelpiece: "I don't think I _am_ quite so much gone off as I expected to be," said Miss Marjoribanks, with candid impartiality; "though of course he will think me stouter--but it does not make any difference about Mr Ashburton being the right man for Carlingford." She said the words with a certain solemnity, and turned Mrs John, who was so much surprised as to be speechless, round again, and led her upstairs. It was as if they were walking in a procession of those martyrs and renouncers of self, who build up the foundations of society; and it would not be too much to say that under her present circumstances, and in the excitement of this singular and unexpected event, such was the painful but sublime consciousness which animated Lucilla's breast. As for Dr Marjoribanks, his triumph was taken out of him by that spectacle. He closed the door after the ladies had gone, and came back to his easy-chair by the side of the fire, and could not but feel that he had had the worst of it. It was actually Mr Cavendish who had come home, and whose address to the electors of Carlingford, dated from Dover on his return to England, the Doctor had just put into his daughter's hand. But wonderful and unlooked-for as was the event, Lucilla, though taken unawares, had not given in, nor shown any signs of weakness. And the effect upon her father of her last utterance and confession was such that he took up the paper again and read both addresses, which were printed side by side. In other days Mr Cavendish had been the chosen candidate of Grange Lane; and the views which he expressed (and he expressed his views very freely) were precisely those of Dr Marjoribanks. Yet when the Doctor turned to Mr Ashburton's expression of his conviction that he was the right man for Carlingford, it cannot be denied that the force of that simple statement had a wonderful effect upon his mind--an effect all the greater, perhaps, in comparison with the political exposition made by the other unexpected candidate. The Doctor's meditations possibly took a slumbrous tone from the place and the moment at which he pursued them; for the fact was that the words he had just been hearing ran in his head all through the reading of the two addresses.