The calls and quick carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were almost the only sounds heard.

Now and then Sylvia's face glanced at them from a house window, but it was quickly withdrawn.

She never liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet she could not have told why.

She had a hazy impression, as she might have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.
"Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to speak a word," she said to herself, as she returned to her seat beside a front window in the south room and took up her book.

She was reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was, moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader.
Henry had flung it aside in contempt.