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Mistress and Maid by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
page 84 of 418 (20%)
two after, Elizabeth followed her with a candle, she found her
standing in the centre of the room, all in the dark, her face white
and her hands trembling.

"Thank you, thank you!" she said mechanically, as Elizabeth folded
and fastened her shawl for her--and descended immediately. Elizabeth
watched her take, not Ascott's arm, but Mr. Lyon's, and walk down the
terrace in the starlight.

"Some'at's wrong. I'd like to know who's been a-vexin' of her,"
thought fiercely the young servant.

No, nobody had been "a-vexing" her mistress. There was nobody to
blame; only there had happened to Hilary one of those things which
strike like a sword through a young and happy heart, taking all the
life and youth out of it.

Robert Lyon had, half an hour ago, told her--and she had had to hear
it as a piece of simple news, to which she had only to say,
"Indeed!"--that to day and to-morrow were his two last days at
Stowbury--almost his last in England. Within a week he was to sail
for India.

There had befallen him what most people would have considered a piece
of rare good fortune. At the London University, a fellow student,
whom he had been gratuitously "coaching" in Hindostanee, fell ill,
and was "thrown upon his hands." as he briefly defined services which
must have been great, since they had resulted in this end. The young
man's father--a Liverpool and Bombay merchant--made him an offer to
go out there, to their house, at a rising salary of 300 rupees a
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