Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/100

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96
THE AUTHOR'S DAUGHTER.

ments on her beauty and accomplishments, but he disliked the trouble of trying to win the heart he took for granted would be sufficiently his own for domestic comfort. Miss Hope disliked Lady Eveline still more when she saw her. Her pupils were never weary of praising her, and the old people liked her modest unpresuming manners, and her acquiescence in all the arrangements they made or proposed for her future home; but Miss Hope saw the truth with the quickness of perception which her own wrongs and her own indignation had sharpened; the girl gave no heart to John Derrick; she was making a worldly marriage of convenience. She had ousted her, Miss Hope, without any excuse or palliation of the offence; she was mercenary, she was deceitful. She could discover the lack of affection in all she said and did, and in all she did not say and did not do. There was no lingering with him in quiet corners of the room, no separating from the party for a quiet tête-à-tête during a walk or excursion, no brightening of her eye as he entered the room in which she sat. She would sit down to the piano to avoid conversation with John Derrick, she would suggest any arrangement that would prevent him from being her only escort to or from a place. The girls thought she was ex-