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Paul Clifford — Volume 02 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 76 of 93 (81%)

When she arrived at the clerical mansion and entered the drawing-room,
she was surprised to find the parson's wife, a good, homely, lethargic
old lady, run up to her, seemingly in a state of great nervous agitation
and crying,--

"Oh, my dear Miss Brandon! which way did you come? Did you meet nobody
by the road? Oh, I am so frightened! Such an accident to poor dear Dr.
Slopperton! Stopped in the king's highway, robbed of some tithe-money he
had just received from Farmer Slowforth! If it had not been for that
dear angel, good young man, God only knows whether I might not have been
a disconsolate widow by this time!"

While the affectionate matron was thus running on, Lucy's eye glancing
round the room discovered in an armchair the round and oily little person
of Dr. Slopperton, with a countenance from which all the carnation hues,
save in one circular excrescence on the nasal member, that was left, like
the last rose of summer, blooming alone, were faded into an aspect of
miserable pallor. The little man tried to conjure up a smile while his
wife was narrating his misfortune, and to mutter forth some syllable of
unconcern; but he looked, for all his bravado, so exceedingly scared that
Lucy would, despite herself, have laughed outright, had not her eye
rested upon the figure of a young man who had been seated beside the
reverend gentleman, but who had risen at Lucy's entrance, and who now
stood gazing upon her intently, but with an air of great respect.
Blushing deeply and involuntarily, she turned her eyes hastily away, and
approaching the good doctor, made her inquiries into the present state of
his nerves, in a graver tone than she had a minute before imagined it
possible that she should have been enabled to command.

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