Her Faithful Knight — page 130: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

126 Her First Rehearsal. Mrs. Stourton-Chepe, who boasted a cheerless and un- comfortable West End flat, up many flights of stairs, with an imposing address, looked at the girl critically through her glasses. “You live in a cottage?” she said. “How interesting! Then, of course, you live in the country ?” “Oh, dear, no; in a very noisy part of Hammersmith. There is quite a wrong impression in the company about me, Mrs. Stourton-Chepe. I believe it is supposed that I am a rich young lady acting for my amusement. It is quite wrong. I have not a penny in the world but what I earn. My parents are dead, and I don’t suppose that in all I,ondon there lives any one poorer or less distinguished than my sister and I.” “You have a sister, then? Only one? And any brothers ?” Dorothy hesitated. She did not feel inclined to speak of Phyllis to this woman with the hard voice and worldly notions. “T have a sister,” she said at last, rather coldly. “She is very ill. And we do not know if our brother is alive or dead.” “She seems a very superior, highly-educated girl,” Mrs. Stourton-Chepe afterward confided to her husband. “And from what she told me she must be so miserably poor that Derrick would be a magnificent catch for her— the chance of a lifetime, in fact. He is positively mad about her, so Mr. Coles and Mr. Wyverley assure me; and he must be infatuated, indeed, if he can put up with her acting. I feel really sorry for the girl, and I shall do all in my power to bring Derrick to the point of proposing.” “H’m! Girls have fancies,’ her’ husband objected. “Shall you think it your duty to tell Miss Knight all that you know of Derrick’s past?” Eomichbooks (S@)