One was bringing out the romance and looking for notices in the papers, which, though they had been significantly short so far, had served to divert her thoughts.

The other was migrating from the vicarage to the more commodious old house of Mrs.Swancourt's, overlooking the same valley.
Mr.Swancourt at first disliked the idea of being transplanted to feminine soil, but the obvious advantages of such an accession of dignity reconciled him to the change.

So there was a radical 'move;' the two ladies staying at Torquay as had been arranged, the vicar going to and fro.
Mrs.Swancourt considerably enlarged Elfride's ideas in an aristocratic direction, and she began to forgive her father for his politic marriage.
Certainly, in a worldly sense, a handsome face at three-and-forty had never served a man in better stead.
The new house at Kensington was ready, and they were all in town.
The Hyde Park shrubs had been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour.

We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o'clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky.

The Swancourt equipage formed one in the stream.
Mrs.Swancourt was a talker of talk of the incisive kind, which her low musical voice--the only beautiful point in the old woman--prevented from being wearisome.
'Now,' she said to Elfride, who, like AEneas at Carthage, was full of admiration for the brilliant scene, 'you will find that our companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading the features of our fellow-creatures here.