He looked at her, for the first time since she had entered the house.

A twinkling light showed itself furtively in his dreary gray eyes: he took a dusty old hand-screen from the sideboard, and made her a present of it! "There," he said with his dry humour, "don't spoil your complexion before the kitchen fire." The cook possessed a sanguine temperament, and a taste to be honoured and encouraged--the taste for reading novels.

She put her own romantic construction on the extraordinary compliment which the doctor's jesting humour had paid to her.

As he walked out, grimly smiling and thumping his big stick on the floor, a new idea illuminated her mind.

Her master admired her; her master was no ordinary man--it might end in his marrying her.
On his way to the telegraph office, Benjulia left Ovid's letters at Mrs.
Gallilee's house.
If he had personally returned them, he would have found the learned lady in no very gracious humour.