Charlotte is very happy; she always had a
happy disposition, but she is gayer than ever since her engagement
with--Valentine."
"What an absurd infatuation!" muttered the Captain.
"And he--Valentine--is very good, and works very hard at his literary
profession--and loves her very dearly."
It cost her an effort to say this even now, even now when she fancied
herself cured of that folly which had once been so sweet to her. To speak
of him like this--to put him away out of her own life, and contemplate
him as an element in the life of another--could not be done without some
touch of the old anguish.
There was a loud double-knock at the street-door as she said this, and a
step sounded presently in the passage; a quick, firm tread. There was
nothing stealthy about that, at any rate.
"My friend Lenoble," said the Captain; and in the next instant a
gentleman entered the room, a gentleman who was in every quality the
opposite of the person whom Diana had expected to see.
These speculative pictures are seldom good portraits. Miss Paget had
expected to find her father's ally small and shrivelled, old and ugly,
dried-up and withered in the fiery atmosphere of fraud and conspiracy; in
outward semblance a monkey, in soul a tiger. And instead of this
obnoxious creature there burst into the room a man of four-and-thirty
years of age, tall, stalwart, with a fair frank face, somewhat browned by
summer suns; thick auburn hair and beard, close trimmed and cropped in
the approved Gallic fashion--clear earnest blue eyes, and a mouth whose
candour and sweetness a moustache could not hide.
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