She was splendidly dressed, as became an Earl's daughter, and he was brilliant with some star which had been accorded to him by his sovereign's grateful minister in return for staunch parliamentary support.

No one looking at them could have imagined that such a father could have told such a daughter that she must marry herself out of the way because as an unmarried girl she was a burden.
During the dinner she was very gay.

To be gay was the habit,--we may almost say the work,--of her life.

It so chanced that she sat between Sir Timothy Beeswax, who in these days was a very great man indeed, and that very Dolly Longstaff, whom Silverbridge in his irony had proposed to her as a fitting suitor for her hand.
"Isn't Lord Silverbridge a cousin of yours ?" asked Sir Timothy.
"A very distant one." "He has come over to us, you know.

It is such a triumph." "I was so sorry to hear it." This, however, as the reader knows, was a fib.
"Sorry!" said Sir Timothy.