THE STEADFAST HEART
creature…. He sought to accustom himself to her moods and humors and sudden changes, but never could he grow accustomed…. Theirs was a queer relationship….
It was about this time that Lydia made a queer, rather startling, and altogether momentous discovery. Silently she had been regarding Angus during dinner, studying him abstractedly, with a puzzled look. When he was gone she said to Mary Browning, “Why, Mary, Angus Burke is actually good-looking.”
“Yes,” said Mary, “he’s a wholesome-looking boy. Too grave for his years.”
“I don’t mean that,” Lydia objected quickly, “he looks—oh, as if he’d had a grandfather.”
Mary smiled. “You’ll be trying to furnish him with ancestors next…. I do wish you thought less about family, Lydia.”
“What better could I think about?… But, just the same, he looks like a gentleman.” There was a touch of stubbornness in her tone. “And it doesn’t seem possible. It isn’t possible…. I saw his father once.”
“Nonsense. When could you have seen his father?”
Lydia’s eyes filled with the remembered horror of that meeting, with the dreadfulness of the event, and with the loathsomeness of Titus Burke. “It was a long time ago,” she said
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