He seemed to believe it himself, for he told it with a gravity of face, and a seriousness of manner, which would ill comport with its falsity.

and Ruth looked up with sudden seriousness in her blue eyes, as a child questions an elder, eager, yet wistful.

Not one had fallen as yet, and Iridion felt no pain or any symptom of approaching dissolution, except, it may be, the unwonted seriousness with which, having exhausted all her simple skill on behalf of the languishing plant, she sat down to consider its fate in the light of its bearing upon her own.

Mrs. Marshall kissed her good-bye gently, not smiling at Sylvia's attempt to lighten the moment's seriousness by saying playfully, "Now, Mother, don't you be such an old worrier!"

He began by treating her with mock seriousness as a person of consideration, and before long was more than the Grand Turk in her estimation; indeed, when a letter came from her father on the Continent, asking that his little girl might join him there, we wondered how she would take the news.

How amazed at your seriousness about ranchingbut how distrustful!

" "Can you cultivate a talent, if you have only a taste to start with?" said Marian, with more seriousness than Patty's careless remark seemed to call for.

But he laughed a strange, hollow laugh, and, endeavouring to turn his seriousness into humour, said, "Well, they might give you a turn, perhaps.

My Lord, I have a little seriousness at heart upon this point, where your Lordship affects to show so much.

I am willing, says she, to have hopes of him: but am so unable to know how to depend upon his seriousness for an hour together, that all my favourable accounts of him in this respect must be taken with allowance.

They entered with such seriousness on their countenances that I felt my spirit suddenly drawn towards them in love, and a secret prayer was raised in my heart for their everlasting good.

Was nobody ever present in a well-ordered family, when a lively conversation having been interrupted by the announcement of dinner, the company, after listening with the greatest seriousness to a grace delivered with equal seriousness, perhaps by a clergyman, resumed it the instant afterwards in all its gaiety, with the first spoonful of soup?

His mirth is without malice or indecency, and his seriousness without gloom.

Yesterday I learned that shares were offered at £10 each, perchance from the efforts of forestallers, as also from the preaching of a dissenter, who fulminates that the end of the world is but three weeks away, which hath induced great seriousness among the people.

" He spoke in his usual pleasant fashion, but there was a grim seriousness behind it which no one could pretend to misunderstand.

He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures.

Arnold looked up from the huge, costly, bloody beefsteak he was eating and, after an instant's survey of the grave, kind, face opposite him, answered with a seriousness like her own, "Because I wanted to get away."

But Musgrave, in his sturdy, common-sense way, only laughed at her seriousness over such kickshaws.

" Her glance was like the tip of a rapier, searching him through for some iota of seriousness under this banter.

And it was not merely the perennial vivacity, the fun shading down to seriousness, and the seriousness up to fun, in perpetual and charming vicissitude;here was the man of culture, of scientific training, the man who had thought as well as felt, and who had fixed purposes and sacred convictions.