Hubert abruptly drew out his watch. “I expect here at any moment,” he said, “a young lady of whom you may have heard. She is to come and see my portrait. I am engaged to marry her. I was engaged to marry her five months ago. She is rich, pretty, charming. Say but a single word, that you don’t despise me, that you forgive me, and I will give her up, now, here, forever, and be anything you will take me for,—your husband, your friend, your slave!” To have been able to make this speech gave Hubert immense relief. He felt almost himself again. Nora fixed her eyes on him, with a kind of unfathomable gentleness. “You are engaged, you were engaged? How strangely you talk about giving her up! Give her my compliments!” It seemed, however, that Nora was to have the chance of offering her compliments personally. The door was thrown open and admitted two ladies whom Nora vaguely remembered to have seen. In a moment she recognized them as the persons whom, on the evening she had gone to hear Hubert preach, he had left her, after the sermon, to conduct to their carriage. The younger one was decidedly pretty, in spite of a nose a trifle too aquiline. A pair of imperious dark eyes, as bright as the diamond which glittered in each of her ears, and a nervous, capricious rapidity of motion and gesture, gave her an air of girlish brusquerie, which was by no means without charm. Her mother’s aspect, however, testified to its being as well to enjoy this charm at a distance. She was a stout, coarse-featured, good-natured woman, with a jaded, submissive expression, and seemed to proclaim by a certain ponderous docility, as she followed in her daughter’s wake, the subserviency of matter to mind. Both ladies were dressed to the uttermost limit of opportunity. They came into the room staring frankly at Nora, and overlooking Hubert, with a gracious implication of his being already one of the family. The situation was a trying one, but he faced it as he might. “This is Miss Lambert,” he said gravely; and then with an effort to dissipate embarrassment by a jest, waving his hand toward his portrait, “This is the Reverend Hubert Lawrence!” The elder lady moved toward the picture, but the other came straight to Nora. “I have seen you before!” she cried defiantly, and with defiance in her pretty eyes. “And I have heard of you too! Yes, you are certainly very handsome. But pray, what are you doing here?” “My dear child!” said Hubert, imploringly, and with a burning side-glance at Nora. The world seemed to him certainly very cruel.