His Grace — page 157: what you’re looking at

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

HLS GRACE. 15! occasion an appropriate one for stating that, in my opinion, that intention ought not any longer to be kept secret. She did not mention Miss St. George; nor did I. Alas! she was likely to hear all that she wanted to hear, and perhaps a little more, about Miss St. George before she was much older. I had work to do both in the afternoon and evening, which was a blessing for me, as indeed work always is foreverybody. The unemployed members of the house- hold were probably discontented—at any rate, they seemed to be rather bored and rather cross when I saw them—but what could Ido to help them? Trouble was assuredly in store for two, if not all four of us; still it was out of my power to avert that, and, luckily for me, it was also out of my power to brood over the future, except during an occasional spare five minutes. Dukes, like humbler mortals, have work to do, and their work, generally speaking, is not of a very inter- esting kind. Hurstbourne was disagreeably reminded of this on the following morning when the post brought him a request from the mayor of a certain manufactur- ing town, situated some twenty or thirty miles north of us, that he would be pleased to open the public library which was about to be established in that prosperous borough. Another magnate had consented to perform that pleasing duty, but the other magnate was in bed with a dreadful bad cold, and his Worship appealed to his Grace’s well-known kindness of heart to come over, at short notice, and to shed the requisite light of aris- tocratic patronage upon the proceedings. “T’ll see them all jolly well hanged first!” was Hurstbourne’s first exclamation as he threw the docu- ment down. ‘“ What the dickens do I know about GEomicboo cS €om