with interest.

'"A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a new-born
thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She had not yet
said a direct word to him, and yet he was curiously convinced that
here was one of the most interesting persons, and one of the persons
most interesting to _him_, that he had ever met. What mingled
delicacy and strength in the hand that had lain beside her on the
dinner-table--what potential depths of feeling in the full dark
fringed eye!

Half-an-hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing room, he
found Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French window that looked
out on the lawn and on the dim rocky face of the fell. Adeline
Baker, a stooping, red-armed maiden, with a pretty face, set off,
as she imagined, by a vast amount, of cheap finery, was sitting
beside her, studying her with a timid adoration. The doctor's
daughter regarded Catherine Leyburn, who during the last five years
had made herself almost as distinct a figure in the popular imagination
of a few Westmoreland valleys as Sister Dora among her Walsall
miners, as a being of a totally different Order from herself. She
was glued to the side of her idol, but her shy, and awkward tongue
could find hardly anything to say to her. Catherine, however,
talked away, gently stroking the while the girl's rough hand which
lay on her knee, to the mingled pain and bliss of its owner, who
was outraged by the contrast between her own ungainly member and
Miss Leyburn's delicate fingers.

Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply avenging
herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might have received