She had done the best she could with Alfred Dinks, but was extremely dissatisfied with her best; and, seeing Hope and Amy together, she had been hovering about them for a long time, anxious to overhear or to join in.
"Really," said Amy, looking up with a smile, "I was making a very innocent remark." "Perfectly innocent, I'm sure!" replied Fanny, in her sweetest manner.
It was such a different sweetness from Amy Waring's, that Hope turned and looked very curiously at Miss Fanny.
"There are few men of forty who have not been in love," said Amy, calmly.
"That is what I was saying." As there was only one man of forty, or near that age, in the little group, the appeal was evidently to him.

Lawrence Newt looked at the three girls, with the swimming light in his eyes, half crushing them and smiling, so that every one of them felt, each in her own way, that they were as completely blinded by that smile as by a glare of sunlight--which also, like that smile, is warm, and not treacherous.
They could not see beyond the words, nor hope to.
"Miss Amy is right, as usual," said he.
"Why, Uncle Lawrence, tell us all about it!" said Fanny, with a hard, black smile in her eyes.
Uncle Lawrence was not in the slightest degree abashed.
"Fanny," said he, "I will speak to you in a parable.

Remember, to _you_.
There was a farmer whose neighbor built a curious tower upon his land.
It was upon a hill, in a grove.

The structure rose slowly, but public curiosity rose with fearful rapidity.

The gossips gossiped about it in the public houses.