Lady Grace had turned to meet Mr. Hugh Crimble, whose pleasure in at once finding her lighted his keen countenance¹ and broke into easy words. “So awfully² kind of you — in the midst of the great doings I noticed — to have found a beautiful minute for me.”

“I left the great doings, which are almost over, to every one’s relief, I think,” the girl returned, “so that your precious time shouldn’t be taken to hunt for me.”

It was clearly for him, on this bright answer, as if her white hand were holding out the perfect flower of felicity. “You came in from your revels³ on purpose — with the same charity you showed me from that first moment?” They stood smiling at each other as in an exchange of sympathy already confessed — and even as if finding that their relation had grown during the lapse⁴ of contact; she recognising the effect of what they had originally felt as bravely as he might name it. What the fine, slightly long oval of her essentially⁵ quiet face — quiet in spite of certain vague depths of reference to forces of the strong high order, forces involved and implanted, yet also rather spent in the process — kept in range from under her redundant⁶ black hat was the strength of expression, the directness of communication, that her guest appeared to borrow from the unframed and unattached nippers unceasingly perched, by their mere⁷ ground-glass rims⁸, as she remembered, on the bony bridge of his indescribably authoritative⁹ (since it was at the same time decidedly inquisitive) young nose. She must, however, also have embraced in this contemplation, she must more or less again have interpreted, his main physiognomic mark, the degree to which his clean

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