, the gentle, tranquil people, the simple, serious life - the
sense of these things pressed upon her with an overmastering force, and she felt
herself yielding to one of the most genuine emotions she had ever known. »I
should like to stay here,« she said. »Pray take me in.«
    Though she was smiling, there were tears in her voice as well as in her
eyes. »My dear niece,« said Mr. Wentworth, softly. And Charlotte put out her
arms and drew the Baroness toward her; while Robert Acton turned away, with his
hands stealing into his pockets.
 

                                       IV

A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her American
kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white
house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth's own dwelling of which mention has already been
made. It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth
placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a
domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course
of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal
of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in the
family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame Münster's return
to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty
sister. If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that
the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating
occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source
of entertainment. This was not Mr. Wentworth's way of treating any human
occurrence. The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the
Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations
required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its
principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and badly, in the light of
the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise with which Felix
Young's American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they
scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society. The
arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly
joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise
of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr.
Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and
aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment