And so only Markworth and Miss Kingscott knew of her dawning reason; with them both she spoke now as sensibly as themselves, and as to Markworth she was his abject slave.
The first reasoning thought that filled the poor girl’s vacuous brain was one of heartfelt devotion to him who had led her out of darkness to light. She looked upon him as her saviour, ignorant as she was of a higher and more powerful God than he; and he was so uniformly kind and considerate to her, seemingly anticipating her every wish, that one cannot wonder at her slavish idolatry. He was her god—her all; she loved him as a dog would love its master, and everything he did was right: his word, law.
Markworth’s material was now plastic enough.
Volume One—Chapter Thirteen.
Brother and Sister.
“Now, Lizzie, I want to know what all this means?” said the Reverend Herbert Pringle, B.A., putting on quite a fatherly dignity of manner to his sister, an evening or two after Lady Inskip had spoken to him. “I want to know what all this means.”
Lizzie was at the time engaged lifting pots up and down, and poking about in her little conservatory, which jutted out of the drawing room, with a trowel and watering-pot, in the manner peculiar to young ladies of a horticultural tendency. Her back was turned to her brother, so that he could not see her face, but a brilliant tinge of pink carnation coloured her little white neck, and suffused her dainty-cheeks, and ascended even to the pure white forehead; still she steadfastly kept her head down, bent apparently on investigating the wonderful mysteries of some flower with a horribly long Greek name, which she was inspecting.
She must have guessed intuitively what her brother was going to speak about, but with a woman’s noble gift of dissimulation, she asked, with an air of candour and conscious rectitude—little hypocrite!