daresay she flatters herself Mr. Tryan may fall in love with her, because
he makes her useful among the poor.' At the same time, Miss Eliza, as she
bent her handsome head and large cannon curls with apparent calmness over
her work, felt a considerable internal flutter when she heard the knock
at the door. Rebecca had less self-command. She felt too much agitated to
go on with her pasting, and clutched the leg of the table to counteract
the trembling in her hands.

Poor women's hearts! Heaven forbid that I should laugh at you, and make
cheap jests on your susceptibility towards the clerical sex, as if it had
nothing deeper or more lovely in it than the mere vulgar angling for a
husband. Even in these enlightened days, many a curate who, considered
abstractedly, is nothing more than a sleek bimanous animal in a white
neck-cloth, with views more or less Anglican, and furtively addicted to
the flute, is adored by a girl who has coarse brothers, or by a solitary
woman who would like to be a helpmate in good works beyond her own means,
simply because he seems to them the model of refinement and of public
usefulness. What wonder, then, that in Milby society, such as I have told
you it was a very long while ago, a zealous evangelical clergyman, aged
thirty-three, called forth all the little agitations that belong to the
divine necessity of loving, implanted in the Miss Linnets, with their
seven or eight lustrums and their unfashionable ringlets, no less than in
Miss Eliza Pratt, with her youthful bloom and her ample cannon curls.

But Mr. Tryan has entered the room, and the strange light from the golden
sky falling on his light-brown hair, which is brushed high up round his
head, makes it look almost like an aureole. His grey eyes, too, shine
with unwonted brilliancy this evening. They were not remarkable eyes, but
they accorded completely in their changing light with the changing
expression of his person, which indicated the paradoxical character often
observable in a large-limbed sanguine blond; at once mild and irritable,
gentle and overbearing, indolent and resolute, self-conscious and dreamy.
Except that the well-filled lips had something of the artificially
compressed look which is often the sign of a struggle to keep the dragon
undermost, and that the complexion was rather pallid, giving the idea of
imperfect health, Mr. Tryan's face in repose was that of an ordinary
whiskerless blond, and it seemed difficult to refer a c