"And where will you be when you are not at home?"
"Weel, sir"—and she hesitated a little—"weel, sir, where can the like o' me be but at service? We hae nae muckle choice, folk like us."
"Choice!" thought the doctor. "At service! Why, to be served by a being wearing such a face must be like being waited on by an angel: she might have her choice of the crowned heads of Europe."
He sprang into his gig: all his sense of fatigue had vanished, and a new and strange feeling had taken possession of him.
"And they are going to send her to service!" he said to himself. "What a shame!"
And yet he knew he was unreasonable. As she herself had said, what choice was there in her rank of life? and it was only her beautiful face that made it seem at all out of place; but what an only that was! "Why," he thought, "I have been five and twenty years in the world, and I have never seen a face to match it—never!"
At dinner that day Dr. Brunton was rather preoccupied and taciturn till his sister asked him if he had yet happened to see Lady Louisa Moor.
"No," he said, "I have not had that pleasure."
"Well, it is a pleasure," she said: "I think she is as pretty a girl as I ever saw."
"Pretty!" said he: "why, I saw a girl to-day—a hind's daughter—so beautiful that I can't think how I never heard of her before: her beauty is a thing to be spoken about."