Status Updates From Lorna Doone

For I was ready to kiss his hand, to think that any man in London (the meanest and most suspicious place, upon all God's earth) should trust me with five pounds, without even a receipt for it! It overcame me so that I sobbed; for, after all, though big in body, I am but a child at heart. It was not the five pounds that moved me, but the way of giving it; (...)

(...) But though I lay hidden behind the trees upon the crest of the stony fall, and waited so quiet that the rabbits and squirrels played around me, and even the keen-eyed weasel took me for a trunk of wood - it was all as one; no cast of colour changed the white stone, whose whiteness now was hateful to me; nor did wreath or skirt of maiden break the loneliness of the vale.

Nay, pardon me, whosoever thou art, for seeming fickle and rude to thee; I have tried to do as first proposed, to tell the tale in my own words, as of another's fortune. But, lo! I was beset at once with many heavy obstacles, which grew as I went onward, until I knew not where I was, and mingled past and present. And two of these difficulties only were enough to stop me; (...)

Here he sat down, with a glisten in his eyes, and called for a little mulled bastard. All the maids, who had now come back, raced to get it for him, but Annie, of course, was foremost. And herein ended the expedition, a perilous and a great one, against the Doones of Bagworthy; an enterprise over which we had all talked plainly more than was good for us. (...)

(...) And he changed his face every moment so, and with such power of mimicry, that without so much as a smile of his own, he made even mother laugh so that she broke her new tenpenny waistband; and as for us children, we rolled on the floor, and Betty Muxworthy roared in the wash-up.

Annie was her love and joy. For Annie, she would do anything, even so far as to try to smile, when the little maid laughed and danced to her. And in truth, I know not how it was, but everyone was taken with Annie at the first time of seeing her. She had such pretty ways and manners, and such a look of kindness, and a sweet, soft light in her long, blue eyes, full of trustful gladness.