the manuscript that reached him on the third of these days
and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth.
The departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't,
of course, thank heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence
of arrangements made, in a rage of curiosity, as they professed,
produced by the touches with which he had already worked us up.
But that only made his little final auditory more compact and select,
kept it, round the hearth, subject to a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement
took up the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun.
The fact to be in possession of was therefore that his old friend,
the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson,
had, at the age of twenty, on taking service for the first time
in the schoolroom, come up to London, in trepidation, to answer
in person an advertisement that had already placed her in brief
correspondence with the advertiser. This person proved, on her
presenting herself, for judgment, at a house in Harley Street,
that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective
patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life,
such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel,
before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage.
One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out.
He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind.
He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid,
but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she
afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as
a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur.
She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--