His Grace — page 164: what you’re looking at

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

18 HIS GRACE. secret over and over again and escaping detection. After all, I should have hated Hurstbourne if he had been vain enough to detect it, and I was not half as much provoked with him as I was with her. I have often noticed—and I daresay other people may have noticed the same thing, though to the best of my belief they haven’t often said so—that women, who are so infinitely more acute than we are, are nevertheless far worse hands at keeping their own counsel under certain circumstances. They always adopt the same transparent system of tactics, and the strange part of it is that they don’t always fail in misleading the person whom it is their wish to mislead. As for the bystanders, it is impossible that they should be misled, unless they happen to be as placidly dense as good Lady Charles Gascoigne, and one can’t safely count upon meeting with a large number of Lady Charles Gascoignes. For all that, I could see that Hurstbourne did not altogether like my-sister’s ready acquiescence in his eulogies of the girl who (as she doubtless imagined) had supplanted her. He was probably conscious of her insincerity, though he could not understand why she should be insincere—which naturally irritated him. I need scarcely say that I was upon tenterhooks the whole time, fearing that he should be enlightened by some unguarded utterance ; anda very great joy and relief it was to me to hear him announce all of a sudden that he was going off to Leicestershire at last to finish the season. | “It’s rather ridiculous to hire a house and stables at Milton for the winter and never use them,” he explained half apologetically ; though indeed there was not the slightest reason to apologize. Gomicboo m