A Fair Fraud — page 84: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“A Fair Fraud — 73 ha followed his hostess across the room and found himself bowing to a small girl in white. ‘Why, she is an exceedingly pretty girl!’ he said to himself as he gravely offered her his arm. And probably the fact would never have come home to him but for Mrs Drury’s elaborate apologies, for he rarely looked a woman critically in the face, regarding them mostly with a blank gaze of indifference, unless, indeed, it fell to his lot to cross- examine them in the witness-box, when they became at once very much more interesting to him. Edgar Naylor was a successful barrister; a rising man whose name was becoming very well known in legal circles. He had talent, and he had had luck, and people said of him — that, having set his foot well upon the lower rungs of the ladder of fame, there was no reason why he should not, if he chose, rise in time to the very summit of it. His work was his chief joy in life. After that he loved shooting, and never, if he could help it, refused the offer of a few days of good sport. He had been at Eton with Kenneth Drury, and had continued his friend through after life, although it had so happened that from one cause or another he had never before been to stay at Crookthorpe, and he had never been introduced to Captain Drury’s ElOOO© 4 (G' O)