His Grace — page 29: what you’re looking at

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

HIS GRACE. | 23 ability was no more than was to be expected of her. The tiny white hands-that held her knitting-pins trembled while I unfolded my tale, and so did the gray curls, which have been arranged after the same fashion on either side of her thin face since the year 1840 or thereabouts, for I am a clumsy, methodical fellow, and I can’t unfold any tale unless I begin at the be- ginning ; but she did not interrupt me, and she heaved a long sigh of relief when she heard that, in spite of my ill-advised quarrel with her brother-in-law, I was not left without the means of earning my subsistence. ‘¢‘T am sure you know best, Philip,” she said, when I had made an end of speaking, “and I daresay you will be happier at Hurstbourne Castle than you would have been in London; but isn’t it a rather uncertain sort of prospect ?” Well, of course it was that; only, as I pointed out to her, Uncle John had offered me no prospect at all, except that of being assisted out into the street, if I did not adopt a more dignified plan of stepping over his threshold of myownaccord. She was easily reassured, She had lost the power of looking far ahead ; probably also she thought, what ought to be quite true, that an able-bodied man is never inany real danger of starving. Naturally enough, she was less confident with regard to my sister’s future, and I was not surprised when she presently appealed to me to say what was to become of a girl who had been educated asa lady (and was con- sequently quite incompetent to educate others) in the event of her being left alone and penniless in the world. What indeed! My mother had put this question to me many a time before, and never had I been able to make any satisfactory reply. Gomichboo cS (E(e) m