She had lost the odd expression which Henry had dimly perceived several days before, or she was able to successfully keep it in abeyance; still, there was no doubt that a strange and subtle change had occurred within the woman.

Henry was constantly looking at her when she spoke, because he vaguely detected unwonted tones in her familiar voice; that voice which had come to seem almost as his own.

He was constantly surprised at a look in the familiar eyes, which had seemed heretofore to gaze at life in entire unison with his own.
He often turned upon Sylvia and asked her abruptly if she did not feel well, and what was the matter; and when she replied, as she always did, that nothing whatever was the matter, continued to regard her with a frown of perplexity, from which she turned with a switch of her skirts and a hitch of her slender shoulders.

Sylvia, while she still evinced exultation over her new possessions, seemed to do so fiercely and defiantly.
When Horace Allen arrived she greeted him, and ushered him into her new domain with a pride which had in it something almost repellent.
At supper-time she led him into the dining-room and glanced around, then at him.
"Well," said she, "don't you think it was about time we had something nice like this, after we had pulled and tugged for nothing all our lives?
Don't you think we deserve it if anybody does ?" "I certainly do," replied Horace Allen, warmly; yet he regarded her with somewhat the same look of astonishment as Henry.

It did not seem to him that it could be Sylvia Whitman who was speaking.