Explore "Given in Marriage" by B.M. Croker on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The Fairplains coffee, fully maintained its high reputation, and the accompanying food was on the same satisfactory level; fresh cream, bread and butter, apricot jam, and new-laid eggs, grilled ham and chicken -- what a welcome change, from the sodden West Coast fare, to which Mayne had been accustomed. Besides the menu, he could not help being impressed by the deep mutual affection, existing between Travers and his daughter; how quietly she forestalled all his requirements, how his dark eyes softened, when they met her glance, and how the pair laughed, and chaffed, one another with light-hearted enjoyment.
Mayne cast a thought to the domestic atmosphere of his own home. What a contrast to this! There, a fashionably youthful woman of fifty, shrank from the too convincing appearance of a son of seven and twenty, and her early morning manner was particularly chilly and acidulated. Breakfast was never a convivial meal.