About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our feet--the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon.

True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same.
The admirable Mrs.Considine got married.

A retired warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (_on avait fait continent a part_, as the French might say) during that period, a Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant correspondent, had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queen's Gate and, in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the admirable and unresisting lady.

It was a matter of special license, and off went the tardily happy pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes.
It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs.Considine, said Barbara.

She thought her--no; perhaps she didn't think her--God alone knows the convolutions of feminine mental processes--but she proclaimed her anyhow--an unscrupulous woman.
"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that boarding-house." "My dear," said I, "Mrs.Jupp--I admit it's deplorable taste to change a name of such gentility as Considine for that of Jupp, but it isn't unscrupulous--Mrs.Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the rest of her life." "That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted.