I heard father tell the Rector he'd spent eighteen hundred at that sale.' 'And I'm ashamed to face any of the tradesmen,' said Pamela fiercely.

'Why they go on trusting us I don't know.' Desmond looked out of the window with a puckered brow--a slim figure in his cadet's uniform.

To judge from a picture on the wall behind his head, an enlarged photograph of the late Mrs.Mannering taken a year before the birth of the twins--an event which had cost the mother her life--Desmond resembled her rather than his father.

In both faces there was the same smiling youthfulness, combined--as indeed also in Pamela--with something that entirely banished any suggestion of insipidity--something that seemed to say, 'There is a soul here--and a brain.' It had sometimes occurred, in a dreamy way to Pamela, to connect that smile on her mother's face with a line in a poem of Browning's, which she had learnt for recitation at school: This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together.
Had her mother been happy?
That her children could never know.
Desmond's countenance, however, soon cleared.

It was impossible for him to frown for long on any subject.