The Widowed Bride — page 213: what you’re looking at

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

i _, Se THE WIDOWED BRIDE, CHAPTER XXIX. IN THE BLUE DRAWING-ROOM, The journey across England, in which the Earl of Glen- hampton was accompanied by his newly recovered daughter, was one fraught with the deepest and tenderest interest to him. Alice’s recollection of her life with old Jason Gar- field—her description of the beautiful sister, who was even now beneath the shadows of her ancestral home, never once dreaming of the right that she possessed there—her innocent questions, and the joy with which her hungered nature took in all the fullness of a father’s love—were alike delightful to the solitary man, who seemed to behold in her once again the lineaments and expression of the woman he had loved so dearly and lost so long ago—Allegra, the first Countess of Glenhampton. Alice—or Allegra, as her father persisted now in calling her—shook her head with a happy, blushing laugh, as she looked up once in the course of their journey and_ beheld the earl’s dark, sad eyes fixed upon her with admiring ten- derness. “You will not have a second look for me, papa,” she said, archly, ‘‘when you have seen Rena. Mena is far, far more beautiful than I!” “Is she hike you, Allegra?” “Oh, no—no, papa! Rena is—yes, she is like you,” add- ed Allegra, the sudden conviction flashing into her mind, as she looked earnestly into her father’s face. ‘‘Her pro- file is like yours, and she has just such dark eyes as you . have—but every one thinks Rena so beautiful! You have seen her, Ernest—tell papa about her.” Captain Evelyn, who was as yet in ignorance of the devel- opment concerning his mother’s plots and maneuvering wickedness, which had so recently transpired, pulled his mustache a little awkwardly, and felt himself color beneath the bronze of sunshine and wind which the last few weeks had bestowed upon brow and temple. ‘‘She’s very handsome,” said Ernest; ‘‘but after all I like this little girl the best.” ‘And you are right, Ernest,” said the earl, sadly. “A OP COomIcbooks.co!