United States or Montenegro ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Chrystie, the idea accepted and held in dazzled contemplation, suddenly saw a flaw. "But where would we get any men?" "We know some and we could find some more." "You talk as if you could find them scattered about on the ground the way they found nuggets in '49. Let's count our nuggets." She held up the spread fingers of a large white hand, bending one down with each name.
Her mind accepted that instantaneously, corroborating memories coming quick to her call. They flashed across her mental vision, vivid and detached like slides in a magic lantern glimpses of Chrystie in her unfamiliar brooding and her flushed elation, and the walks, the long walks, from which she returned withdrawn and curiously silent the silence of enraptured retrospect.
Mayer was putting his affairs in order, preparatory to flight. A final interview with Chrystie would place him where he wanted to be, and that would be followed by a visit to Sacramento and a withdrawal of what remained of his money. He had a little over two thousand dollars left, enough to get them to New York and keep them there for a month or so in a good hotel.
Now they've broken out and I suppose it's only a matter of time before the flies gather, and if you asked me I'd say they'd gather thickest round Chrystie. She hasn't as much character or brains as Lorry, but she's prettier and jollier, and after all that's what most men like." "It certainly is, especially with four hundred thousand thrown in for good measure."
"Having no man in the family certainly is inconvenient," came from Chrystie, and then with sudden recollection: "What happened to Marquis de Lafayette? Why didn't he come and get it?" "I don't know, I'm sure." Lorry was looking out of the window. "Well, I must say if we ask him to our parties the least he can do is to find our hacks." "I think so, too," said Aunt Ellen.
He thought her emotion the expression of overwrought nerves, and consoled her with assurances of a speedy finding of Aunt Ellen. She dropped her hands, lifted to his a face that startled him, and cried from the depths of a despair he had yet to understand. "It's Chrystie, it's Chrystie! She's gone, she's lost!"
He would have to leave on the morning train, call up Chrystie at seven, go out and change the tickets, and meet her at Oakland. In the sudden concentrating of perils, the elopement was gradually losing its surreptitious character and becoming an affair openly conducted under the public eye. But there was no other course.
"We've got to wear them somewhere," Lorry decided. "For one reason we've almost nothing else, and for another and the real one Fong mustn't know he's rescued the wrong things. I will weed the garden in white satin slippers, and I'll put on a ball dress for dinner every night." Chrystie was well again now.
Lorry saw the change as the result of a widening social experience she had tried to find amusement, the proper surroundings of her age and station, for Chrystie and she had succeeded. Gayeties had grown out of that first, agitating dinner till they now moved through quite a little round of parties. Under this new excitement Chrystie was acquiring poise, also fluctuations of spirit and temper.
He followed their eyes and saw a sight that made him halt Lorry, her satin-slippered feet stepping delicately along the grimy pavements, her pale skirts emerging from the rich sheath of her cloak. Beside her, responding to a beckoning hand, a carriage rattled down upon Chrystie and Aunt Ellen. They had a carriage and she had had to go and find it!
Word Of The Day