Her Faithful Knight — page 80: what you’re looking at

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

76 Ways and Means. feeling was plainly shown. Her pride and weakness, her repellent coldness and appealing gentleness alternately combined to make up a personality as fascinating as it was out of the common run of his experiences. He thought about her for fully half an hour after he had returned to his spacious, solemn house, presided over by his widowed sister. Buta fashionable doctor has many demands upon his time, his skill, and, above all, upon that quality which some call sympathy, and others magnetism. Between his first and second visit to Lockhart Cottages upon that par- ticular Sunday, Dr. Morgan was successively called to the bedside of a wealthy paralyzed octogenarian, an anemic schoolgirl, and a middle-aged dipsomaniac, and the keen edge of his sympathy was by necessity blunted by such exhausting contact. On the occasion of his second call upon his new patient her sister was absent, having per- force summoned up sufficient endurance to face an inter- view with Mrs. Julia Knight, of Belvidere Gardens, Hyde - Park, the wealthy widow of her father’s uncle. Mrs. Julius Knight lived and dined in a spacious stucco mansion in Bayswater. Advisedly be it mentioned that she dined, for dinner to Mrs. Knight—a perfectly served, ~ admirably cooked dinner—was the aim and end of exist- ence. ‘To entertain friends at the evening meal, to dazzle them by the expensiveness of her silver and her hand- painted dessert plates, the excellence of her chef’s entre- mets and the bouquet of her wine cellar’s treasures, these were the chief joys of Mrs. Julius Knight’s choosing, and they ranked almost higher in her estimation than the blessed privilege of wearing more expensive gowns and better diamonds than any of her guests could afford to display. The late Mr. Julius Knight had been something highly successful in the city. In middle age he had married a plump, talkative and handsome foreign lady, who for ten Eomichoo CS (G@)