Her accent was pure, unpretentious; and she used none of the fashionable turns of speech which would have suggested the habit of intercourse with distinctly metropolitan society.
'You must wonder how we exist in this out-of-the-way place,' remarked Maud.
'Rather, I envy you,' Marian answered, with a slight emphasis.
The door opened, and Alfred Yule presented himself.

He was tall, and his head seemed a disproportionate culmination to his meagre body, it was so large and massively featured.

Intellect and uncertainty of temper were equally marked upon his visage; his brows were knitted in a permanent expression of severity.

He had thin, smooth hair, grizzled whiskers, a shaven chin.

In the multitudinous wrinkles of his face lay a history of laborious and stormy life; one readily divined in him a struggling and embittered man.