he judicial eye behind the eye-glass travelled round the table,
lingering, as it seemed to Mrs. Thornburgh's excited consciousness, on
every spot where cream or jelly or _meringue_ should have been and was
not. When it dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to
restrain herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew,
giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the meal
which did but confirm her neighbour--a grim, uncommunicative person--in
his own devotion to a policy of silence. Meanwhile the vicar was
grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. Seaton. Mrs. Leyburn had
fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Dr.
Baker, Agnes with Mr. Mayhew's awkward son--a tongue-tied youth, lately
an unattached student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an
invincible antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some other
opening into the great world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her into a white
dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, and she was
like a Stothard picture with her high waist, her blue sash ribbon, her
slender neck and brilliant head. She had already cast many curious
glances at the Thornburghs' guest. 'Not a prig, at any rate,' she
thought to herself with satisfaction, 'so Agnes is quite wrong.'

As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state which so
often follows on the long confinement of illness, when the light seems
brighter and scents keener and experience sharper than at other times,
he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. Thornburgh had not been romancing.
The vivid creature at his elbow, with her still unsoftened angles and
movements, was in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty; the plain
sister had struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes'
conversation as above the average in point of manners and talk. As to
Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with her, but he was
watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out of his quick observant
eyes.

She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth at her side,
Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the unusually clear and
perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper lip. The hollows in the
cheeks struck him, and the way in which the breadth of the forehead
somewhat overbalanced the delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face,
though still quite young, and expre