Of course she looked a thought older, a thought thicker--not so much in her upright figure, as in her clever, irregular-featured face.

In the days of his early manhood she had never seemed to him to be very much older than himself--but now she looked a lifetime older than he felt.
Only Mr.Tosswill looked absolutely unchanged.

His mild benevolent face, his deep blue eyes, his grey hair, seemed exactly the same as when Radmore had last sat down, in the Old Place dining-room, to a full table.
That had been in the Christmas holidays of 1910.

Very well he remembered all that had happened then, for he and Betty had just become engaged.
At nineteen Betty Tosswill had belonged to the ideal type of old-fashioned English girlhood--high-spirited, cheerful, artless yet intelligent, with a strong sense of humour.

She had worn a pink evening frock during those long-ago Christmas holidays, and had looked, at any rate in her young lover's eyes, beautiful.
They had been ardently, passionately in love, he a masterful, exacting lover, and though seeming older than his age, without any of the magnanimity which even the passage of only a very few years brings to most intelligent men.