‘My brother has gone to the Abbey.’
To herself she was thinking, ‘What a great, queer, awkward-looking creature. Surely he can’t belong to one of those “fossilised Roman Catholic families” whom Jerome told me about, as being the only aborigines fit to visit.’
‘Oh! I saw the light in the window, and supposed he was in. I did not know you had arrived.’
‘Do you want to see him particularly?’
‘Oh, another time will do, I suppose. He has just got engaged to my cousin and my greatest friend, and I came to wish him joy.’
A pause. Then Avice said:
‘Miss Bolton is your cousin. Then of course you know her?’
‘I have known her since she was a baby.’
‘Then you must be Mr. Leyburn, I am sure. Jerome often used to speak of you in his letters.’
‘Yes, that is my name,’ said John, unable to take his eyes from the figure before him, with her lovely flushed face, ruffled golden hair, and violet eyes at once bright with recent tears and dark and tired with the fatigue of travelling, and, it must be confessed, with an overpowering drowsiness, to which she had been just on the point of yielding when he arrived. She was like nothing he had ever seen before, and he felt tongue-tied and paralysed in her presence–as if, if he spoke, he would infallibly say something idiotic, even drivelling, and as though, if he moved, his boots would creak, or he would fall over something. Together with these sensations, an intense anxiety neither to speak as a fool, nor to tumble down; which combined currents of emotion rendered his position anything but an agreeable one.