Molly thought over all that she had heard, as she was dressing and putting on the terrible, over-smart plaid gown in honour of the new arrival.  Her unconscious fealty to Osborne was not in the least shaken by his having come to grief at Cambridge.  Only she was indignant—­with or without reason—­against Roger, who seemed to have brought the reality of bad news as an offering of first-fruits on his return home.

She went down into the drawing-room with anything but a welcome to him in her heart.  He was standing by his mother; the squire had not yet made his appearance.  Molly thought that the two were hand in hand when she first opened the door, but she could not be quite sure.  Mrs. Hamley came a little forwards to meet her, and introduced her in so fondly intimate a way to her son, that Molly, innocent and simple, knowing nothing but Hollingford manners, which were anything but formal, half put out her hand to shake hands with one of whom she had heard so much—­the son of such kind friends.  She could only hope he had not seen the movement, for he made no attempt to respond to it; only bowed.

He was a tall powerfully-made young man, giving the impression of strength more than elegance.  His face was rather square, ruddy-coloured (as his father had said), hair and eyes brown—­the latter rather deep-set beneath his thick eyebrows; and he had a trick of wrinkling up his eyelids when he wanted particularly to observe anything, which made his eyes look even smaller still at such times.  He had a large mouth, with excessively mobile lips; and another trick of his was, that when he was amused at anything, he resisted the impulse to laugh, by a droll manner of twitching and puckering up his mouth, till at length the sense of humour had its way, and his features relaxed, and he broke into a broad sunny smile; his beautiful teeth—­his only beautiful feature—­breaking out with a white gleam upon the red-brown countenance.  These two tricks of his—­of crumpling up the eyelids, so as to concentrate the power of sight, which made him look stern and thoughtful; and the odd twitching of the lips, which was preliminary to a smile, which made him look intensely merry—­gave the varying expressions of his face a greater range ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe,’ than is common to most men.  To Molly, who was not finely discriminative in her glances at the stranger this first night, he simply appeared ’heavy-looking, clumsy,’ and ‘a person she was sure she should never get on with.’  He certainly did not seem to care much what impression he made upon his mother’s visitor.  He was at that age when young men admire a formed beauty more than a face with any amount of future capability of loveliness, and when they are morbidly conscious of the difficulty of finding subjects of conversation in talking to girls in a state of feminine hobbledehoyhood.  Besides, his thoughts were full of other subjects, which he did not intend to allow to ooze out in words,