That many women--as a gentleman she would excuse him, of course, from mentioning names--but many beautiful women had often sought his society, but being deficient, madam, absolutely deficient, in this quality, he could not reciprocate.

But when two natures thoroughly in sympathy, despising alike the sordid trammels of a low and vulgar community and the conventional restraints of a hypocritical society--when two souls in perfect accord met and mingled in poetical union, then--but here the colonel's speech, which had been remarkable for a certain whisky-and-watery fluency, grew husky, almost inaudible, and decidedly incoherent.

Possibly Mrs.Tretherick may have heard something like it before, and was enabled to fill the hiatus.
Nevertheless, the cheek that was on the side of the colonel was quite virginal and bashfully conscious until they reached their destination.
It was a pretty little cottage, quite fresh and warm with paint, very pleasantly relieved against a platoon of pines, some of whose foremost files had been displaced to give freedom to the fenced enclosure in which it sat.

In the vivid sunlight and perfect silence, it had a new, uninhabited look, as if the carpenters and painters had just left it.

At the farther end of the lot, a Chinaman was stolidly digging; but there was no other sign of occupancy.