Her Faithful Knight — page 138: what you’re looking at

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

134 65%. Darcy’s Sympathy. on speaking terms from one week’s end to another; and for myself, I hadn’t seen him for years when he died. But, for all that, an absurd conventionality supposes us to be plunged in woe and crape, and we dare not go coun- ter to it. One owes so much to one’s position in society. But my mother adores me, and takes the keenest interest in everything that I undertake; and so, dear soul, she has come to see my play, not one word of which she will un- derstand, but which she will think a masterpiece for the sake of her boy.” © “Is she so fond of you, then?” Dorothy asked, looking at him with interest. He had just the sort of good looks, she decided, which would partake of the angelic character ina child. Of course, he was wonderfully good looking, but personally she preferred something more massive and rugged in a man, a red-brown skin instead of that girlish fairness, massive limbs in place of that slender grace, and _ honest, brown eyes to those languishing blue ones—but here she stopped her thoughts, blushing ere they pictured too clearly the face and figure of her museum acquaint- ance, Aylmer Read. “Will you tell me what you were thinking of when you looked at me just now?” Darcy Derrick asked softly, coming a little nearer to her. But Dorothy was not in the least embarrassed, as he rather hoped she would be. “T must confess that my thoughts were very far away,” she answered, smiling indifferently. Just so far as the British Museum is from Hastings, she might have added, but she did not think fit to do so. “You were speaking about your mother ?” Darcy was piqued and disappointed. For more than a week he had seen the girl, with whom he had fallen pas- sionately in love at first sight, during several hours daily; yet her gray eyes could meet his love-sick glances un- flinchingly, and no trace of a blush passed over her clear, Eomichooks