than I can tell you now. There may be news from the station between this
and then."

The dinner was a wearisome ordeal to at least two other persons
present besides Blanche. Arnold, sitting opposite to Geoffrey, without
exchanging a word with him, felt the altered relations between his
former friend and himself very painfully. Sir Patrick, missing the
skilled hand of Hester Dethridge in every dish that was offered to
him, marked the dinner among the wasted opportunities of his life, and
resented his sister-in-law's flow of spirits as something simply inhuman
under present circumstances. Blanche followed Lady Lundie into the
drawing-room in a state of burning impatience for the rising of
the gentlemen from their wine. Her step-mother--mapping out a new
antiquarian excursion for the next day, and finding Blanche's ears
closed to her occasional remarks on baronial Scotland five hundred years
since--lamented, with satirical emphasis, the absence of an intelligent
companion of her own sex; and stretched her majestic figure on the sofa
to wait until an audience worthy of her flowed in from the dining-room.
Before very long--so soothing is the influence of an after-dinner
view of feudal antiquities, taken through the medium of an approving
conscience--Lady Lundie's eyes closed; and from Lady Lundie's nose
there poured, at intervals, a sound, deep like her ladyship's learning;
regular, like her ladyship's habits--a sound associated with nightcaps
and bedrooms, evoked alike by Nature, the leveler, from high and
low--the sound (oh, Truth what enormities find publicity in thy
name!)--the sound of a Snore.

Free to do as she pleased, Blanche left the echoes of the drawing-room
in undisturbed enjoyment of Lady Lundie's audible repose.