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A large arm-chair stood by the side of the burnt-out fire, shadowed over by the huge marble mantel-piece, the back of which was carried up twining and curving into a thousand arabesque and armorial devices until it blended with the richly painted ceiling. In one corner a narrow couch with a rug thrown across it showed where the faithful Bontems had spent the night.
There were books and newspapers on the table, the fireplace was half-full of the ashes of a burnt-out fire, there were faded flowers in a tall vase near the window, there was the undefinable presence of life in the heavier and warmer air.
Their closed house looks to me as though ruined and burnt-out, and we have already seen the nettles spring up which grow everywhere among the ruins of human dwellings."
Sun struck down, making a dazzle about him. Shann turned over drowsily in that welcome heat, stretching a little as might a cat at ease. Then he really awoke under the press of memory, and the need for alertness rode him once more. Beaten-down grass, the burnt-out embers of last night's fire were beside him. But of Thorvald and the wolverines there were no signs.
Sometimes he would sit licking a lump of such salt as is given to cows, or eating a huge lump of dates, stones and all, such as one sees in London on barrows. For drink he walked to the rivulet beyond the burnt-out site of the Experimental Farm at Hickleybrow and put down his face to the stream.
He dropped his burnt-out cigarette into the ash-tray at his side. The rocker creaked rhythmically. "Mary, I want to draw Rosamond," said Stefan thoughtfully. "Oh, do you, dearest? That will be nice!" she exclaimed, her face breaking into a smile of pleasure. "Yes. Do you know, I was watching the little thing this afternoon, when Gunther and all the others were playing with her.
My pen is unfortunately too feeble to bring vividly before my readers the picture such as I beheld it here, and to describe to them the desolation, the extent and height of these lava-masses. I seemed to stand in a crater, and the whole country appeared only a burnt-out fire.
As the fresh coals began to kindle feebly, he looked again at the lamp. It was odd, to say the least of it, that the light should have accidentally gone out, exactly at the right time to realize the fanciful extinction of it in his dream. How was it there was no smell of a burnt-out lamp? He was too lazy, or too tired, to pursue the question.
One was a man, very much bandaged as to his head, who sat gazing into the coal-stove, which occupied the centre of the car, with weakly meditative, burnt-out eyes. The other was a girl, occupying the seat directly in front of me. She might have been nine years old, but she had a singularly faded and mature countenance. As the train started, she turned to me with some excitement:
Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background, where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-out passions?
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