She bade her good-bye with genuine regret; the only person who bore her departure without a shade of compunction being Dare, who stood by the carriage till the last moment, assuring Ruth that he hoped to come over to the rectory very shortly; while Charles and Molly held the gate open meanwhile, at the end of the short drive.
"I know that Frenchman means business," said Lady Mary wrathfully to herself, as she watched the scene from the garden.

Her mind, from the very severity of its tension, was liable to occasional lapses of this painful kind from the spiritual and ecclesiastical to the mundane and transitory.

"I saw it directly he came into the house; and with _his_ opportunities, and living within a stone's-throw, I should not wonder if he were to succeed.

Any man would fetch a fancy price at Slumberleigh; and the most fastidious woman in the world ceases to be critical if she is reduced to the proper state of dulness.

He is handsome, too, in his foreign way.