instant she was another woman. She rose impulsively and took a chair at
my side, and said:--

"'Tis so I love to hear you speak, Richard, when you uphold the absent.
For I feel it is so you must champion me when I am far away. My dear old
playmate is ever the same, strong to resent, and seeing ever the best in
his friends. Forgive me, Richard, I have been worse than silly. And
will you tell me that story of your adventures which I long to learn?"

Ay, that I would. I told it her, and she listened silently, save only
now and then a cry of wonder or of sympathy that sounded sweet to my
ears,--just as I had dreamed of her listening when I used to pace the
deck of the brigantine John, at sea. And when at length I had finished,
she sat looking out over the Green Park, as tho' she had forgot my
presence.

And so Mrs. Manners came in and found us.

It had ever pleased me to imagine that Dorothy's mother had been in her
youth like Dorothy. She had the same tall figure, grace in its every
motion, and the same eyes of deep blue, and the generous but well-formed
mouth. A man may pity, but cannot conceive the heroism that a woman of
such a mould must have gone through who has been married since early
girlhood to a man like Mr. Manners. Some women would have been driven
quickly to frivolity, and worse, but this one had struggled year after
year to maintain an outward serenity to a critical world, and had
succeeded, tho' success had cost her dear. Each trial had deepened a
line of that face, had done its share to subdue the voice which had once
rung like Dorothy's; and in the depths of her eyes lingered a sadness
indefinable.