bright eyes of Miss Thorpe were incessantly challenging his notice; and
to her his devoirs were speedily paid, with a mixture of joy and
embarrassment which might have informed Catherine, had she been more
expert in the development of other people's feelings, and less simply
engrossed by her own, that her brother thought her friend quite as
pretty as she could do herself.

John Thorpe, who in the mean time had been giving orders about the
horse, soon joined them, and from him she directly received the amends
which were her due; for while he slightly and carelessly touched the
hand of Isabella, on her he bestowed a whole scrape and half a short
bow. He was a stout young man, of middling height, who, with a plain
face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he
wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were
easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed
to be easy. He took out his watch:--"How long do you think we have been
running in from Tetbury, Miss Morland?"

"I do not know the distance." Her brother told her that it was
twenty-three miles.

"_Three_-and-twenty!" cried Thorpe; "five-and-twenty if it is an inch."
Morland remonstrated, pleaded the authority of road-books, innkeepers,
and milestones: but his friend disregarded them all; he had a surer test
of distance. "I know it must be five-and-twenty," said he, "by the time
we have been doing it." "It is now half after one; we drove out of the
inn-yard at Tetbury as the town-clock struck eleven; and I defy any man
in England to make my horse go less than ten miles an hour in harness;
that makes it exactly twenty-five."