She was but a servant, and yet looks like these engraved themselves ineffaceably on her mistress's heart, imparting the comfort that all pure love gives from any one human being to another.
And love has its wonderful rights and rewards.

Perhaps Elizabeth, who thought herself nothing at all to her mistress, would have marveled to know how much closer her mistress felt to this poor, honest, loving girl, whose truth she believed in, and on whose faithfulness she implicitly depended, than toward her own flesh and blood, who sat there moodily over the hearth; deeply pitied, sedulously cared for, but as for being confided in relied on, in great matters or small, his own concerns or theirs--the thing was impossible.
They could not even ask him--they dared not, in such a strange mood was he--the simple question, Had he seen Mr.Ascott, and had Mr.
Ascott been annoyed about the check?
It would not have been referred to at all had not Hilary, in holding his coat to dry, taken his pocket book out of the breast pocket, when he snatched at it angrily.
"What are you meddling with my things for?
Do you want to get at the check, and be peering at it to see if it's all right?
But you can't; I've paid it away.

Perhaps you'd like to know who to?
Then you shan't.

I'll not be accountable to you for all my proceedings.

I'll not be treated like a baby.