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Gervase liked them for their elegance and their panache, and would have asked them in to supper, so that he might discourse with them all the evening in a language his daughters could not understand. But they made their excuses: they had already stayed too long and their families expected them home. Model young men indeed! Gervase pointed and stressed their excellence as he marched in front of his daughters into the house—a tall black prancing shepherd leading a flock of many-coloured sheep.

§ 7

His daughters were a pretty pack, for the Alards were a handsome family, and Mary Ann Pye's face, though luckily not all her fortune, was just as enviable a dowry. She had given her youngest girls, Bridget and Madge, her ruddy, chestnut hair, her skin of honey and roses; the rest were Alards, brown-haired, blue-eyed and white-skinned where they were not tanned. Bess, the eldest, took care of her complexion and kept it white with cucumber and milk and a strange mess of ashes and almond oil which she plastered on at night, to the derision of her sisters, who conjectured freely as to its effect on her bridegroom. After Bess came Ann, then Henrietta; Gervase was sometimes as much bored by them as he had been by their mother, though on the whole he enjoyed their chatter round his table, and always found pleasure in teasing them and in censuring their country manners.