1 The winged furies were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea.
2 It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in Gerty's heart dropped to earth and lay still.
3 Yet Selden's manner at the Brys' had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in her own heart.
4 At the thought her spirits began to rise: it was characteristic of her that one trifling piece of good fortune should give wings to all her hopes.
5 She leaned on him for a moment, as if with a drop of tired wings: he felt as though her heart were beating rather with the stress of a long flight than the thrill of new distances.
6 As to the nature of Selden's growing kindness, Gerty would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's colours by knocking the dust from its wings.
7 He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.
8 Even at the actual moment of her break with the Dorsets she had not had so keen a sense of its consequences, for the Duchess of Beltshire, hearing of the catastrophe from Lord Hubert, had instantly offered her protection, and under her sheltering wing Lily had made an almost triumphant progress to London.
9 He saw instead, to his surprise, Ned Silverton loitering somewhat ostentatiously about the tables; and the discovery that this actor in the drama was not only hovering in the wings, but actually inviting the exposure of the footlights, though it might have seemed to imply that all peril was over, served rather to deepen Selden's sense of foreboding.