His Other Wife: A Novel — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

160 A DUMB SCOUT. what was feared, reached Mrs. Warren’s cottage on the outskirts of the city. A servant who had been to market brought the story, duly embellished ; and, in breathless excitement, the good dame carried it to her son, who was now so far con- valescent as to sit or walk upon the sunny piazza, or among the flower-beds of the prim garden. Dame Warren found him seated, with his book and cigar, under the drooping boughs of a large and venerable cedar tree at the end of the garden, where a low wicket fence divided it from the orchard, now'a mass of honey- sweet apple blossoms, and all a-swarm with butterflies and bees. Gordon was still very delicate; and the hollowness of his white cheeks, the dark circles round his eyes, told their own story of how nature and death had fought over the stalwart, but now wasted frame of the young man. With many a needless word and irrelevant exclama- tion, the good woman repeated the tragic story of Faith Hilary’s mysterious disappearance with the dark, hand- some stranger who was the guest at Lucerne. Mrs. Warren was not ignorant of her son’s deep interest in the fair young ward of his partner. Indeed, she had never heard him speak so much nor so tenderly of any one; and Faith’s continuous attentions to him during his desperate illness had won for her the old mother’s most grateful “regard. Gordon Warren heard her through with what patience Eomicbooks.¢o