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There was indeed something in his lean, black-clothed figure and swift furtive movements which was like some cruel and cunning animal. He stole along under shadow of the stunted trees and withies, with bent body and gliding gait, so that from Bridgewater it would be no easy matter for the most keen-sighted to see him.
There was an unconscious air of physical lordliness about him, and he looked such a swell not the black-clothed, clean-shaved, great display of white collar-and-cuffs swell appertaining to the office and city street, but of the easy sunburnt squatter type of swelldom, redolent of the sun, the saddle, the wide open country a man who is a man, utterly free from the least suspicion of effeminacy, and capable of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow with an arm ready and willing to save in an accident.
The man turned away as a black-clothed figure emerged from the trees, and came to a stand at the brink of the ravine some hundred and more yards to the east of them. Nancy, too, beheld the lonely figure and she, too, became interested in its movements. The lumber boss laughed shortly, roughly, and raised an arm, pointing as he turned a grinning face to the girl. "See him, there?" he cried.
The black-clothed relations whose faces had been turned toward the front of the long drawing-room now swung round toward the back where a fair-haired little girl, her hands spread guardian-wise round the new black hat on her knees, lay asleep in her father's arms. For old Mrs.
"'Johnny and Jane, Maiden and swain, Never had tasted a drop of champagne; Reason is plain, They lived in Maine, Where all the folks are obliged to drink rain." "H'm. I wish they were," commented the other, regarding the black-clothed figure beside him. A thin veil was pinned to her hat in such a way as to cover the shortness of the soft curls.
He dropped into the chair and the tall, black-clothed figure fell into lax lines; his long fingers, the fingers of an artist, a musician, lay on the arms of the chair limply as if disconnected from any central power; there was surely despair, hopelessness, in the man's attitude.
And as she stood there, awed with the mystical union of a dead love and a living new born self, there came drifting in at the window, faintly, the soft sound of far-off marriage music. "'Tis thy marriage morning, shining in the sun!" Two white and white-swathed brides were coming slowly down the great staircase of Cresswell Oaks, and two white and black-clothed bridegrooms awaited them.
He was borne towards the window where he was held while the master of the mill crashed a foot against its wooden sash. The next moment the black-clothed body was hurled with terrific force out into the snowdrift waiting to receive it. It was all so swiftly done. The whole thing was a matter of seconds only.
"Monsieur," she said, "it is terrible, this ombrelle, when mamma lies at death's door. But what can I do? I have no other, and cannot afford to buy one. The sun is fierce. I dare not expose myself to it without a shelter." She seemed really distressed as she opened the parasol, and spread the vivid silk above her pretty black-clothed figure; but Mr.
She caught her train glowing outwardly from the speed of her ride, and inwardly from the heat of adventure and the thought that at last she was being of some use. The only other occupants of her third-class compartment were a friendly looking man, who might have been a sailor or other wanderer on leave, and his thin, dried-up, black-clothed cottage woman of an old mother.
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