Her Faithful Knight — page 292: what you’re looking at

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

\ 288 The Exhumation. horror with which Darcy’s treachery and callous cruelty had filled her for a time caused her to regard all men with aversion, but now her revulsion of feelings in Ayl- mer’s favor led her to the opposite extreme, and inclined her to idealize him into a figure of superhuman excellence. Happily, Aylmer Read, in the simple directness of his character and his capability of selfless devotion, was molded on sufficiently romantic and heroic lines, as knights of the nineteenth century go; between the ideal Aylmer and the real Aylmer there was no appreciable drop, and the latter was perhaps even the more loveable of the two. Toward him Dorothy’s waking thoughts went out in a rush of passionate gratitude which she had been too much excited to be conscious of on the preceding evening. “He must have thought me horribly hard and cold and suspicious last night,” she told herself. “I need not be all those things with him, I know. I hope he will not love me less because of my coldness. Of course, I ought to hope he will leave off loving me altogether, as the law would pretend I belong to that horrible man just because I was trapped into entering a church and making a prom- ise to him there under false pretenses. But I can’t hope that Aylmer will leave off loving me just yet. I am so badly in need of love and of belief in men. My heart is aching and sore, and I feel after all these years of work and worry and this last terrible grief, that I want rest and comfort and—even a little spoiling with too much kind- ness. It won’t matter in the end. I shall go away to America in a few days and try to find my brother, who won't want me, and try to make the rest of poor old Cresswell’s life happy. At least, I shall be safe from the horror of that man Derrick’s persecution. And before I go I shall say good-by to my kind, dear friend, my only friend, Mr. Read, and he will go back to his dreams of Eomicbooks (E@)