Her Faithful Knight — page 254: what you’re looking at

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

250 Aylmer to the Rescue. Mr. Darcy’s “Love’s Right’? company, in various seaside towns during the preceding year. But there was nothing to lead him to connect Dorothy Knight with Phyllis Knight, or to teach him that the “Dorothea Knight, aged twenty-one, orphan daughter of Harold Everett Knight, formerly of Petersham Lodge and the Stock Exchange,” who about Christmas time had been several times re- quested in the Daily Post and other papers to communi- cate with Messrs. Searle and Glyn, was identical with the “Mrs. Sergius Trevelyan” of the provincial photog- rapher’s letter. He had thought of her constantly none the less. The meteor-like suddenness with which she had flashed in and out of his life, the glimpse he had had into her hard-work- ing, lonely existence, the crystalline purity of her regard, all these things he had thought of and remembered until they had become enshrined as the best part of his inner life, and his ideal love for her had grown to partake of the nature of a chivalrous knight’s devotion to the fayre ladye whose favor he bore. And through it all he was secretly certain he should see her again, and that she was destined in some way to con- trol his life. Sometimes he laughed at himself for the sentimentality of such a conviction; he reminded himself that she had discouraged his advances, and that he had good reason to believe she was the wife of another man. But this last fact he was very loth to accept. Meantime, he was biding his time, waiting until it should please her to enter his life again, and make demands upon the ser- vice of faithful love he longed to lay at her feet. And now within the past twenty-four hours there had come upon him, like a thunderclap out of an untroubled sky, intelligence that a certain paragraph inserted in the issue of the Daily Post on the previous day had reference to none other than “Phyllis Knight, aged twenty, fair, Gomicbdooks (E©)