Lady Muriel laughed, but Madeleine apparently did not perceive the joke. Soon some other callers dropped in, and Mr. Foljambe took his leave. But the subject of Wilmot and his contemplated abandonment of London was not abandoned on his departure. He was well known to the "set" in which the Kilsyths moved, though their own acquaintance with him was so recent, and everyone had something to say about the rising man. The sentimental view of the subject was very general. It was so very charming to think of any man, especially one so talented, so popular, so altogether delightful as Wilmot, being "broken-hearted" by the death of his wife. Lady Muriel gently insinuated, once or twice, a doubt whether there was any ground for this very congenial but rather romantic supposition: her doubts, however, were by no means well received, and she found herself overwhelmed with evidence of the irremediably desolate condition of Wilmot's heart. When the afternoon calls had come to an end, and Lady Muriel and her stepdaughter were in their respective rooms and about to dress for dinner, the mind of each was in accord with that of the other, inasmuch as the same subject of contemplation engrossed both. But the harmony went no farther. Nothing could be more opposite than the effect produced upon Madeleine and Lady Muriel by Mr. Foljambe's news, and by all the desultory discussion and speculation which had followed its announcement. To Madeleine the knowledge that she should see Wilmot no more for an indefinite period was like a sentence of death. The young girl was profoundly unconscious of the meaning of her own feelings. That the sentiment which she entertained towards Wilmot was love, she never for a moment dreamed. In him the ideal of an elevated and refined fancy had found its realisation; he was altogether different from the men she had hitherto met since her emancipation from the schoolroom; different from the hunting, shooting devotees of field-sports, or the heavy country gentlemen given to farming and local politics, who frequented Kilsyth; different from the associates of her brother, who, whether they were merely fashionable and empty, or formal and priggish like Ronald himself, were essentially distasteful to her. She was of a dreamy and romantic temperament, to which the delicacy of health and the not quite congenial conditions of her life at home contributed not a little; and she had seen in Wilmot the man of talent, action, and resolve, the realisation of the nineteenth-century heroic ideal. To admire and reverence him; to find the best and most valuable of resources in his friendship, the wisest and truest guidance in his intellect, the most exquisite of pleasures in his society; to triumph in his fame, and try to merit his approval,--such was the girl's scheme for the future. But it never occurred to her that there was one comprehensive and forbidden word in which the whole of this state of feeling might be accurately defined.