Dr. MacDonald was a big heavily-built man in his late forties, with that well-leathered and spuriously tough look you quite often find among a certain section of the unemployed landed gentry who spend a great deal of time in the open air, much of it mounted on large horses in pursuit of small foxes.

The moment when a man hears that a girl's fiance has died only that day is the last moment that that man should ever begin to fall in love with her, but I'm afraid that's just how it was. The emotions are no respecters of the niceties, the proprieties and decencies of this life.

Foster always said that education was very important, but that it didn't really matter, because intelligence was more important than that, and that even intelligence didn't count for so much, that wisdom was far more important still. He said he had no idea in the world whether you had education or intelligence or wisdom and that it couldn't matter less, a blind man could see that you had a good heart, and the good heart was all that mattered in this world.