I hope he knows what he gets!" "Oh, my son," cried Mrs.Hudson, plaintively, "how could you ever care for such a dreadful creature ?" "It would take long to tell you, dear mother!" Rowland's lately-deepened sympathy and compassion for Christina was still throbbing in his mind, and he felt that, in loyalty to it, he must say a word for her.

"You believed in her too much at first," he declared, "and you believe in her too little now." Roderick looked at him with eyes almost lurid, beneath lowering brows.
"She is an angel, then, after all ?--that 's what you want to prove!" he cried.

"That 's consoling for me, who have lost her! You 're always right, I say; but, dear friend, in mercy, be wrong for once!" "Oh yes, Mr.Mallet, be merciful!" said Mrs.Hudson, in a tone which, for all its gentleness, made Rowland stare.

The poor fellow's stare covered a great deal of concentrated wonder and apprehension--a presentiment of what a small, sweet, feeble, elderly lady might be capable of, in the way of suddenly generated animosity.

There was no space in Mrs.Hudson's tiny maternal mind for complications of feeling, and one emotion existed only by turning another over flat and perching on top of it.