‘Unhand it, sir!’ said Mrs Proudie, with redoubled emphasis, and all but furious wrath. This allusion to the fairies was a direct mockery, and intended to turn her into ridicule. So at least it seemed to her. ‘Unhand it, sir!’ she almost screamed.

‘It’s not me; it’s the cursed sofa,’ said Bertie, looking imploringly in her face, and holding both his hands to show that he was not touching her belongings, but still remaining on his knees.

Hereupon the signora laughed; not loud, indeed, but yet audibly. And as the tigress bereft of her young will turn with equal anger on any within reach, so did Mrs Proudie turn upon her female guest.

‘Madam,’ she said—and it is beyond the power of prose to tell of the fire that flashed from her eyes.

By this time the bishop, and Mr Slope, and her three daughters were around her, and had collected together the wide ruins of her magnificence. The girls fell into circular rank behind their mother, and thus following her and carrying out the fragments, they left the reception–rooms in a manner not altogether devoid of dignity. Mrs Proudie had to retire to re–array herself.

As soon as the constellation had swept by, Ethelbert rose from his knees, and turning with mock anger to the fat rector, said: ‘After all it was your doing, sir—not mine. But perhaps you are waiting for preferment, and so I bore it.’

Whereupon there was a laugh against the fat rector, in which both the bishop and the chaplain joined; and thus things got themselves again into order.

‘Oh, my lord, I am so sorry for this accident,’ said the signora, putting out her hand so as to force the bishop to take it. ‘My brother is so thoughtless. Pray sit down, and let me have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Though I am so poor a creature as to want a sofa, I am not so selfish as to require it all.’ Madeline could always dispose herself so as to make room for a gentleman, though, as she declared, the crinoline of her lady friends was much too bulky to be so accommodated.

‘It was solely for the pleasure of meeting you that I have had myself dragged here,’ she continued. ‘Of course, with your occupation, one cannot even hope that you should have time to come to us, that is, in the way of calling. And at your English dinner–parties all is so dull and so stately. Do you know, my lord, that in coming to England my only consolation has been the thought that I should know you;’ and she looked at him with the look of a she–devil.

The bishop, however, thought that she looked very like an angel, and accepting the proffered seat, sat down beside her. He uttered some platitude as to this deep obligation for the trouble she had taken, and wondered more and more who she was.

‘Of course you know my sad story?’ she continued.

The bishop didn’t know a word of it. He knew, however, or thought he knew, that she couldn’t walk into a room like other people, and so made the most of that. He put on a look of ineffable distress, and said that he was aware how God had afflicted her.

The signora just touched the corner of her eyes with the most lovely of pocket–handkerchiefs. Yes, she said—she had been very sorely tried—tried, she thought, beyond the common endurance of humanity; but while her child was left to her, everything was left. ‘Oh! My lord,’ she exclaimed, ‘you must see the infant—the last bud of a wondrous tree: you must let a mother hope that you will lay your holy hands on her innocent head, and consecrate her for female virtues. May I hope it?’ said she, looking into the bishop’s eye, and touching the bishop’s arm with her hand.