Read "My Lord Duke" by E.W. Hornung online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It is comparatively easy to read a character from a face. This is always a scientific possibility. To fit the face to a given character is obviously the reverse. And those who knew the worst of Lady Caroline Sellwood, before making her acquaintance, received, on that occasion, something like a shock. They had nourished visions of a tall and stately figure with a hook-nose and an exquisitely supercilious smile; whereas her Ladyship was decidedly short, and extremely stout, with as plebeian a snub-nose and as broad a grin as any in her own back-kitchen. Instead of the traditionally frigid leader of society, she was a warm-hearted woman where her own interests were not concerned; where they were, she was just what expedience made her, and her heart then took its temperature from her head, like the excellent servant it had always been. A case very much in point is that of her relations with Claude Lafont, whom, however, Lady Caroline had now her own reasons for fearing no more.
As for the Duke of St. Osmund's, her heart had been a perfect oven to him from the first.