you are much like other male creatures; but I protest I could never
love a man who preferred my company to the service of his king.'

She glided into the alley and sped along its vaulted twilight, her
white dress gleaming and clouding by fits as she went.

The youth stood for a moment petrified, then started to overtake
her, but stood stock-still at the entrance of the alley, and
followed her only with his eyes as she went.

When Dorothy reached the house, she did not run up to her room that
she might weep unseen. She was still too much annoyed with Richard
to regret having taken such leave of him. She only swallowed down a
little balloonful of sobs, and went straight into the parlour, where
her mother and Mr. Herbert still sat, and resumed her seat in the
bay window. Her heightened colour, an occasional toss of her head
backwards, like that with which a horse seeks ease from the bearing-
rein, generally followed by a renewal of the attempt to swallow
something of upward tendency, were the only signs of her
discomposure, and none of them were observed by her mother or her
guest. Could she have known, however, what feelings had already
begun to rouse themselves in the mind of him whose boyishness was an
offence to her, she would have found it more difficult to keep such
composure.

Dorothy's was a face whose forms were already so decided that,
should no softening influences from the central regions gain the
ascendancy, beyond a doubt age must render it hard and unlovely. In
all the roundness and freshness of girlhood, it was handsome rather
than beautiful, beautiful rather than lovely. And yet it was