But Miss Boyce had never shown the smallest consciousness, so far, of anything untoward or unusual in her position.

She had been clearly taken up with the interest and pleasure of this new spectacle upon which she had entered.

The old house, its associations, its history, the beautiful country in which it lay, the speech and characteristics of rural labour as compared with that of the town,--he had heard her talk of all these things with a freshness, a human sympathy, a freedom from conventional phrase, and, no doubt, a touch of egotism and extravagance, which rivetted attention.
The egotism and extravagance, however, after a first moment of critical discomfort on his part, had not in the end repelled him at all.

The girl's vivid beauty glorified them; made them seem to him a mere special fulness of life.

So that in his new preoccupation with herself, and by contact with her frank self-confidence, he had almost forgotten her position, and his own indirect relation to it.