conversation with Mr. Mayhew, giving vent to incoherencies in the
course of the first act of the meal which did but confirm her
neighbor--a grim uncommunicative person--in his own devotion to a
policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was grappling on very unequal
terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had fallen to young Elsmere.
Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr. Baker, Agnes with Mr.
Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately an unattached
student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an invincible antipathy
to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some opening into the great
world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a
white dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and
she was like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash
ribbon, her slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast
many curious glances at the Thornburgh's guest. 'Not a prig, at
any rate,' she thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is
quite wrong.'

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which
so often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light
seems brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at
other times, he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had
not been romancing. The vivid creature at his elbow with her still
unsoftened angles and movements was in the first dawn of an exceptional
beauty; the plain sister had struck him before supper in the course
of twenty minutes' conversation as above the average in point of
manners and talk. As to Miss Leyburn, be had so far only exchanged
a bow with her, but he was watching her now, as he sat opposite to
her, out of his quick observant eyes.