proposed, to please, and this situation made him very happy. Eugenia
would please.

The tall gentleman came to meet her, looking very rigid and grave. But
it was a rigidity that had no illiberal meaning. Mr. Wentworth's manner
was pregnant, on the contrary, with a sense of grand responsibility, of
the solemnity of the occasion, of its being difficult to show sufficient
deference to a lady at once so distinguished and so unhappy. Felix
had observed on the day before his characteristic pallor; and now he
perceived that there was something almost cadaverous in his uncle's
high-featured white face. But so clever were this young man's quick
sympathies and perceptions that he already learned that in these
semi-mortuary manifestations there was no cause for alarm. His light
imagination had gained a glimpse of Mr. Wentworth's spiritual mechanism,
and taught him that, the old man being infinitely conscientious, the
special operation of conscience within him announced itself by several
of the indications of physical faintness.

The Baroness took her uncle's hand, and stood looking at him with her
ugly face and her beautiful smile. "Have I done right to come?" she
asked.

"Very right, very right," said Mr. Wentworth, solemnly. He had arranged
in his mind a little speech; but now it quite faded away. He felt almost
frightened. He had never been looked at in just that way--with just that
fixed, intense smile--by any woman; and it perplexed and weighed upon
him, now, that the woman who was smiling so and who had instantly given
him a vivid sense of her possessing other unprecedented attributes, was
his own niece, the child of his own father's daughter. The idea that his
niece should be a German Baroness, married "morganatically" to a Prince,