Sophia had to make it lucid by short quick questions here and there.
"I'm no good," he concluded, deprecating his own recital.

"Robert has all the language that's in our family; but do you know, miss, what it is to see a face, and know that you know it again, though you can't say what it was like?
Have you the least notion how you would feel on being fooled a second time like that ?" The word of address that he had let fall struck her ear as something inexplicable which she had not then time to investigate; she was aware, too, that, as he spoke fast and warmly, his voice dropped into some vulgarity of accent that she had not noticed in it before.

These thoughts glanced through her mind, but found no room to stay, for there are few things that can so absorb for the time a mind alive to its surroundings as a bit of genuine romance, a fragment of a life, or lives, that does not seem to bear explanation by the ordinary rules of our experience.
That mind is dulled, not ripened, by time that does not enter with zest into a strange story, and the more if it is true.

If we could only learn it, the most trivial action of personality is more worthy of our attention than the most magnificent of impersonal phenomena, and, in healthy people, this truth, all unknown, probably underlies that excitement of interest which the affairs of neighbours create the moment they become in any way surprising.
Sophia certainly did not stop to seek an excuse for her interest.

She plied Alec with questions; she moved with him nearer the Harmon fence to get a better look at the house; she assured him that Chellaston was the last place in the world to harbour an adventurer.
He was a little loth, for the sake of all the pathos of Bates's story, to suggest the suspicion that had recurred.
"I saw the face twice.