strongly attractive, for it bore clear indication of a nature to be
trusted. If her grey eyes were a little cold, they were honest eyes,
with a rare look of steadfastness; and if her lips were a little too
closely pressed, it was clearly from any cause rather than bad
temper. Neither head, hands, nor feet were small, but they were fine
in form and movement; and for the rest of her person, tall and
strong as Richard was, Dorothy looked further advanced in the
journey of life than he.

She needed hardly, however, have treated his indifference to the
politics of the time with so much severity, seeing her own
acquaintance with and interest in them dated from that same
afternoon, during which, from lack of other employment, and the
weariness of a long morning of slow, dismal rain, she had been
listening to Mr. Herbert as he dwelt feelingly on the arrogance of
puritan encroachment, and the grossness of presbyterian insolence
both to kingly prerogative and episcopal authority, and drew a
touching picture of the irritant thwartings and pitiful insults to
which the gentle monarch was exposed in his attempts to support the
dignity of his divine office, and to cast its protecting skirt over
the defenceless church; and if it was with less sympathy that he
spoke of the fears which haunted the captive metropolitan, Dorothy
at least could detect no hidden sarcasm in the tone in which he
expressed his hope that Laud's devotion to the beauty of holiness
might not result in the dignity of martyrdom, as might well be
feared by those who were assured that the whole guilt of Strafford
lay in his return to his duty, and his subsequent devotion to the
interests of his royal master: to all this the girl had listened,
and her still sufficiently uncertain knowledge of the affairs of the
nation had, ere the talk was over, blossomed in a vague sense of