The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their ears full of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are supposed to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer nights, seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies an incomparable resonance.
Mr.Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call upon her, was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece.

It taxed his imagination to believe that she was really his half-sister's child.

His sister was a figure of his early years; she had been only twenty when she went abroad, never to return, making in foreign parts a willful and undesirable marriage.

His aunt, Mrs.Whiteside, who had taken her to Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return, so lamentable an account of Mr.Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong girl had united her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family feeling--especially in the case of the half-brothers.

Catherine had done nothing subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written to them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended sympathy; so that it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the highest charity, as regards this young lady, was to think it well to forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants.