Notwithstanding all the hinderances that envious fate could send, the news so important to the family got itself circulated among them at last, with the result that the strangest excitement, elation, and despondency, a complication of feelings utterly unknown in their healthful history, took possession of the Penton family. They had made up their minds to one thing--they now found themselves and all their projects and plans swallowed up in another. They had adapted themselves, the young ones with the flexibility of youth, to the supposed change in their fortunes. They had now to go back again, to forget all those innumerable consultations, arrangements, conclusions of all kinds, and take up their old plans where they had been abandoned. It had been dreadful to give up Penton. It was scarcely more agreeable to take it back again. And yet an elation, an elevation was in all their minds. Penton was theirs, that palace of the gods. They were no longer nobodies, they were people of importance. The girls found it beyond measure uncomfortable, distracting, insupportable, that on this day of all others, when they had a thousand things to say to each other--questions to ask, suggestions to make, the most amazing revolution to talk over, there should be a stranger always between them, one whom, with that civility which was born with them, and in which they had been trained, they felt themselves constrained to explain everything to, whom they would not leave out of their conversation or permit to feel that she was an intruder. She was an intruder all the same. She was in the way, horribly in the way, at this eventful moment. The family was dissolved by her presence. The father and mother retired together to the book-room to talk there, a thing they never would have done but for the stranger. And Walter strolled off on his side, scarcely saying a word to his sisters, whom he could not approach or communicate his sentiments to in consequence of Mab. It was a heavy task to the two girls to have to entertain her, to go round and round the garden with her, to point out the views of Penton, to explain to her what it was about, when one or another would burst out into some irrestrainable exclamation or remark; but the fate of womankind in general was upon these devoted young women. They had to entertain the visitor, to occupy themselves with the keeping up of appearances, and to put everything that interested them most aside in their hearts.