"Good-bye, Lord Silverbridge," she said quite gaily, and rather more aloud than would have been necessary, had she not intended that the maid also should hear her.
"Poor boy!" she said to herself as she was dressing.

"Poor boy!" Then, when the evening was over she spoke to herself again about him.
"Dear sweet boy!" And then she sat and thought.

How was it that she was so old a woman, while he was so little more than a child?
How fair he was, how far removed from conceit, how capable of being made into a man--in the process of time! What might not be expected from him if he could be kept in good hands for the next ten years! But in whose hands?
What would she be in ten years, she who already seemed to know the town and all its belongings so well?
And yet she was as young in years as he.

He, as she knew, had passed his twenty-second birthday,--and so had she.

That was all.