He rather thought such things as, 'She can afford to be saucy, and to find a source of blitheness in my love, considering the power that wealth gives her to pick and choose almost where she will.' He was bound to own, however, that one of the charms of her conversation was the complete absence of the note of the heiress from its accents.

That, other things equal, her interest would naturally incline to a person bearing the name of De Stancy, was evident from her avowed predilections.

His original assumption, that she was a personification of the modern spirit, who had been dropped, like a seed from the bill of a bird, into a chink of mediaevalism, required some qualification.

Romanticism, which will exist in every human breast as long as human nature itself exists, had asserted itself in her.

Veneration for things old, not because of any merit in them, but because of their long continuance, had developed in her; and her modern spirit was taking to itself wings and flying away.
Whether his image was flying with the other was a question which moved him all the more deeply now that her silence gave him dread of an affirmative answer.
For another seven days he stoically left in suspension all forecasts of his possibly grim fate in being the employed and not the beloved.