L. G. Moberly

“ I love him so, and for all our lives together, I had his love—he was always mine."
"But"—do what he would, Sir Arthur felt impelled to give voice to the flood of thought within him—"he was not worthy of you, Margaret. You can't pretend that he was worthy of your love?" A great rush of colour poured over her white face, her thin hands trembled.
"Worthiness or unworthiness do not seem to come into it at all," she answered, her voice all shaken and low. "When one loves, one loves in spite of everything—in spite of everything." ”

“ The memory of it brought a little flush to her face, even now that she sat alone in the firelight, and brought with it, too, a stab of resentment.
"I don't think I quite like anybody to look at me like that," she thought; "and, after all, even if I am only a nurse, earning my own living—I—am still a woman." She drew up her head with a proud gesture characteristic of her, and then her reflections slipped away from the two men who had driven her to the doctor's house, and wandered on to the doctor himself. ”

“ Remembering the silence in the valley, she shuddered a little, and wondered whether the lady of the unfathomable eyes ever minded the loneliness and silence; whether sometimes she was afraid—down there in the stillness of those sheltering woodlands.
"I don't suppose I shall ever know any more about her," the girl's thoughts ran on, "but I should like to see her again. I never saw anybody like her in my life before, and she looked so sad; I wish I could have helped her more." ”

“ Children all, these men-folk of the world! Children all, they have been from days immemorial, and presumably will be still the same in the days to come. And their womenkind love them, and comfort them, guide them and tend them, learning, with the sure instinct of womanhood, that they are just little boys, to be taken care of, and watched over, and "mothered" all the time. Christina knew this truth instinctively, if she could not have put it into definite words; Christina knew it; each daughter of Eve knows it by experience bitter or sweet—it is the truth that "every woman knows"! ”

“ No ray of the sunshine that still shone on the moorland above, penetrated into this valley, whose steep, thickly-wooded sides threw deep shadows across it. "What on earth possessed anybody to build a house in this gloomy hole, when all the uplands were there to be built upon?" So Fergusson's musings ran on, whilst the shadows thickened round him, the gloom of the place beginning to oppress him like a nightmare. The roughness and steepness of the road obliged him to proceed slowly and with great caution, and the fast-fading light made his progress a difficult one. ”

“ To me, Christmas is scarcely Christmas if it is not spent in a home—a real home."
In the flash of a second, Cicely, with her wonted kindly impulsiveness, made up her mind to do what in the bottom of her soul, she knew she loathed doing, and what she knew would rob her own Christmas of all its joyousness. She looked from one to the other of the two Congreves—Sir Arthur still upright on the hearth-rug; his wife a small, dejected heap in an armchair—and said in her most gracious manner—
"I do wonder if you will do what I am going to ask you to do? ”

“ Life has brought so much more pain than joy—that—I am not either sorry or afraid. Only I wish I could have done more for my world, before I went out of it," she added half whimsically, half sadly, a little smile breaking over her face.
"Perhaps what you have been, has had even more influence over your world than what you have done," Fergusson said quietly; "it is not always the most apparently active people, who have the greatest effect on their fellows." ”

“ Perhaps all rooms in a more or less degree are reflections of those who live in them: human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, stamp their personalities upon their surroundings, and create their distinctive atmospheres, even in hired lodgings. Rupert's rooms, filled as they were with the furniture he had from time to time picked up, the walls hung with pictures his fastidious taste had chosen, the bookcases filled with his own special collection of books, were, to those with eyes to see, a mirror of their master's nature. ”