Dinah Craik

“ Maud went away, rather cross and dissatisfied, but evidently suspecting nothing. For me, I began to be seriously uneasy about her and Lord Ravenel.
Of all kinds of love, there is one which common sense and romance have often combined to hold obnoxious, improbable, or ridiculous, but which has always seemed to me the most real and pathetic form that the passion ever takes—I mean, love in spite of great disparity of age. Even when this is on the woman's side, I can imagine circumstances that would make it far less ludicrous and pitiful ”

“ Halifax, I will detain you no longer.
John intercepted the young man's departure.
"No, you do NOT understand me. I hold no man accountable for any errors, any shortcomings, except his own."
"I am to conclude, then, that it is to myself you refuse your daughter?"
"It is."
Lord Ravenel once more bowed, with sarcastic emphasis.
"I entreat you not to mistake me," John continued, most earnestly. "I know nothing of you that the world would condemn, much that it would even admire; but your world is not our world, nor your aims our aims. ”

“ Let me assure you there will be no impediments on the side of my family. The earl has long wished me to marry. He knows well enough that I can marry whom I please— and shall marry for love only. Give me your leave to win your little Maud."
A dead silence.
"Again pardon me," Lord Ravenel said with some hauteur; "I cannot have clearly explained myself. Let me repeat, Mr. Halifax, that I ask your permission to win your daughter's affection, and, in due time, her hand." ”

“ In marriage there must he perfect unity; one aim, one faith, one love, or the marriage is incomplete, unholy—a mere civil contract and no more."
Lord Ravenel looked up amazed at this doctrine, then sat awhile pondering drearily.
"Yes, you may be right," at last he said. "Your Maud is not for me, nor those like me. Between us and you is that 'great gulf fixed;'— what did the old fable say? I forget.—Che sara sara! I am but as others: I am but what I was born to be."
"Do you recognize what you were born to be? Not only a nobleman, but a gentleman ”

“ I think in the wonderful workings of things—as we know all things do work together for good—this fact was good for Ursula. It taught her that, in losing Guy, she had not lost all her blessings. It showed her what in the passion of her mother-love she might have been tempted to forget—many mothers do—that beyond all maternal duty, is the duty that a woman owes to her husband: beyond all loves, is the love that was hers before any of them were born.
So, gradually, as every day John's letters came,—and she used to watch for them and seize them as if they had been love-letters ”

“ John read it, somewhat more seriously than he had been used to read these letters—which for the last year or so had come often enough— the boys usually quizzing, and Mistress Maud vehemently defending, the delicate small hand-writing, the exquisite paper, the coronetted seal, and the frank in the corner. John liked to have them, and his wife also—she being not indifferent to the fact, confirmed by many other facts, that if there was one man in the world whom Lord Ravenel honoured and admired, it was John Halifax of Beechwood. ”

“ Ay, this was the change—stranger at first than what had befallen Guy—for that long seemed a thing we could not realise; like a story told of some other family than ours. The present tangible blank was the house with its head and master away. ”

“ The lad was hurried off immediately, for fear of justice: but he had written from shipboard to Lord Ravenel, begging him himself to take the letter and break the news to us at Beechwood.
The man he had struck was not one of Lord Luxmore's set—though it was through some of his "noble" friends Guy had fallen into his company. He was an Englishman, lately succeeded to a baronetcy and estate; his name—how we started to hear it, though by Lord Ravenel and by us, for his sake, it was both pronounced and listened to, as if none of us had ever heard it before—Sir Gerard Vermilye. ”

“ Halifax when they married?"
"Father was twenty-one and mother was eighteen—only a year older than I." And Maud, half ashamed of this suggestive remark, ran away. Her gay candour proved to me—perhaps to others besides me—the girl's entire free-heartedness. The frank innocence of childhood was still hers.
Lord Ravenel looked after her and sighed. "It is good to marry early; do you not think so, Mr. ”