He means to act for himself, and make people and things obey him, just as you yourself do.
And," she went on, with a daring surely not a little magnificent under the circumstances--"he told me he loved life too well to care very much how he came by it to begin with." Damaris folded her arms, let her head sink on them as she finished speaking, and lay flat thus, her face hidden, while she breathed short and raspingly, struggling to control the after violence of her emotion.
The curtain hung straight.

The wind took up its desolate chant again.

And Sir Charles Verity sat back in the angle of the arm-chair, motionless, and, for the present, speechless.
In truth he was greatly moved, stirred to the deep places of perception, and of conscience also.

For this death of childhood and birth of womanhood undoubtedly presented a rare and telling spectacle, which, even while it rent him, in some aspects enraged and mortified him, he still appreciated.

He found, indeed, a strangely vital, if somewhat cruel, satisfaction in looking on at it--a satisfaction fed, on its more humane and human side, by the testimony to the worth of the unknown son by the so well-beloved daughter.