There were only two or three houses in Drayton Parva where Mr. and Mrs.

Nevill Tyson were received. A thrill of guilty expectation used to go

through the room when they were announced, and people watched them with

a fearful interest, as if they were the actors in some enthralling but

forbidden drama.

Perhaps, if she had been tried by a jury of her peers--but Mrs. Nevill

Tyson had no peers in Drayton Parva. She was tried by an invisible and

incorruptible jury of ideas in Miss Batchelor's head. Opinion sways all

things in Drayton Parva, and Miss Batchelor swayed opinion.

As for Mr. Nevill Tyson, he had dropped into Leicestershire from heaven

knows where, and was understood to be more or less on his trial. Nobody

knew anything about him, except that he was a nephew of old Tyson of

Thorneytoft, and had come in for the property. Nobody cared much for

old Tyson of Thorneytoft; he was not exactly--well, no matter, he was

very respectable and he was dead, which entitled him to a little

consideration. And as Mr. Nevill Tyson was an unmarried man in those

days he naturally attracted some attention on his own account, as well

as for the sake of the very respectable old man, his uncle.

He was first seen at a dinner at the Morleys. Somebody else happened to

be the guest of the evening, and somebody else took Lady Morley in to

dinner. Tyson took Miss Batchelor, and I don't think he quite liked

it. Miss Batchelor was clever--frightfully clever--but she never showed

up well in public; she had a nervous manner, and a way of looking at you

as if you were some curious animal that she would like to pat if she were

perfectly sure you were not dangerous. And when you were about to take

compassion on her shyness, she startled you with a sudden lapse into

self-possession. I can see her now looking at Tyson over the frills on

her shoulder, with her thin crooked little mouth smiling slightly. She

might well look, for Nevill Tyson's appearance was remarkable. He might

have been any age between twenty-five and forty; as a matter of fact he

was thirty-six. England had made him florid and Anglo-Saxon, but the

tropics had bleached his skin and dried his straw-colored hair till it

looked like hay. His figure was short and rather clumsily built, but

it had a certain strength and determination; so had his face. The

determination was not expressly stated by any single feature--the mouth

was not what you would call firm, and the chin retreated ever so slightly

in a heavy curve--but it was somehow implied by the whole. He gave you

the idea of iron battered in all the arsenals of the world. Miss

Batchelor wondered what he would have to say for himself.




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