Lucius Davoren, Volume III by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Cheered and sustained by the hope of another happy afternoon with Janet in the little cottage parlour, Geoffrey Hossack made himself wonderfully agreeable to his cousins Belle and Jessie, and shot the game on his uncle's estate, and on the estates of his uncle's neighbours, with a good will. He was always popular, and in this part of Hampshire he was accepted as a product of the soil, and cherished accordingly. His father had been liked before him, and people expressed their regret that an alien trader should occupy the house where that gentleman had once dispensed what our ancestors were wont to call an elegant hospitality.

‘O, I mean to marry, and turn out the sugar-broker some day,' Geoffrey would reply in answer to these friendly speeches. Whereat Belle and Jessie would both blush, and look at each other, and then at the carpet. So bright a spot had that rustic tea-drinking made in the life of this infatuated gentleman, that the sunshine lingered after the event, and the mere memory of that one happy hour with Janet made life pleasant to him for a long time. Belle and Jessie noticed his high spirits, and each flattered herself with the idea that it was her society which gladdened him. And when they ‘talked him over,' as they called it, at hair-brushing time, they in a manner congratulated each other upon his ‘niceness,' just as if he were a kind of common property, and could marry both of them. He had still one tiresome trick, and that was a habit of rambling off for long solitary walks, in what the sisters considered a most unsociable spirit.