"How is she?" Grace felt softened by his tone.
"A different person since she went there. I went up there for a few days...." A curious hesitation in his manner struck her.
"I shall like being with my sister. I shall very much dislike being with some one else," Grace said, with a bitterness of tone he could not help noticing.
"Not--Mrs. Dorriman!" she rejoined, imitating the little pause he had made, and looking at him with laughing eyes.
Mr. Stevens got up and looked out of the window. Grace called him back. "Did you come to see how I was? I do not look very robust, but I intend to get well up in the North."
"But you are afraid? Mr. Stevens, your face is nearly as good as a looking-glass. I see exactly how I look by the expression of your eyebrows. When you come into the room they are tidy and straight; if I look well they arch up into a sort of surprised state, as much as to say 'That girl is a riddle to me, she is actually better, who would have thought it?' When I look very ill, as I suppose I look to-day, they go down in a melancholy line and say as plainly as possible, 'Poor thing! she is going down-hill very fast.'"
"Miss Rivers, I am sorry my eyebrows should be so very inconveniently expressive," he said, trying to laugh, and feeling absolutely heartsick; she seemed to him frightfully ill, and so utterly devoid of anything like serious thought.
"You need not be sorry," she said, in an odd tone; "we none of us know anything of each other, and I daresay I judge you quite as hardly as you do me."
"You think I am so fearfully frivolous and thoughtless and----I cannot at this moment think of any other words."
"I know your sister best. She is not thoughtless: and may I say to you, Miss Rivers, that the more I know her the more thunderstruck I am at her ever having married poor Drayton?"
"Yes, ever since his boyhood. He had no chance. His father and mother were cousins, and insanity in the family. It was terrible to me to hear of his marriage."
"You do not like Mr. Sandford. I remember hearing this. I cannot bear him."
"That does not alter things a bit. When I think of all his rudeness and violence ... and he always looks to me as though he had some great sin lying on his conscience."