An uninitiated observer, hearing him, would have imagined her to be a person of a certain age--possibly an affectionate maiden aunt--who had once done him a kindness which he highly appreciated: perhaps presented him with a check for a thousand dollars.

Rowland noted the difference between his present frankness and his reticence during the first six months of his engagement, and sometimes wondered whether it was not rather an anomaly that he should expatiate more largely as the happy event receded.

He had wondered over the whole matter, first and last, in a great many different ways, and looked at it in all possible lights.

There was something terribly hard to explain in the fact of his having fallen in love with his cousin.

She was not, as Rowland conceived her, the sort of girl he would have been likely to fancy, and the operation of sentiment, in all cases so mysterious, was particularly so in this one.