Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant

The Archdeacon returned to Carlingford before Thursday, as he had anticipated; but in the interval Mr. Cavendish had not recovered his courage so far as to renew his visit to Miss Marjoribanks, or to face the man who had alarmed him so much. Everybody in Grange Lane remarked at the time how worried poor Mrs. Woodburn looked. Her eyes lost their brightness, which some people thought was the only beauty she had, and her nerves and her temper both failed her, no one could tell why. The personal sketches she made at this moment were truculent and bitter to an unheard-of degree. She took off Mr. Beverley with a savage force which electrified her audience, and put words into his mouth which everybody admitted were exactly like him, if he could ever be imagined to have fallen into the extraordinary circumstances in which the mimic placed him. In short, Mrs. Woodburn made a little drama out of the Archdeacon.

Mr. Beverley, of course, knew nothing about this, and showed some surprise now and then at the restrained laughter which he heard in the corners; but when anybody spoke of Mrs. Woodburn, he showed an instinctive want of confidence. "I have not studied her sufficiently to give an opinion of her," he said, which was certainly the very reverse of her deliverance upon him. To tell the truth, she had rather studied him too much, and gave too keen an edge to his characteristic qualities, as is natural to all literary portraiture, and even went so far that, in the end, people began to ask whether she had any personal spite against him.