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Save for the curling smoke that streamed lazily upward from his cigar one might have thought the banker fast asleep in his chair, so still he sat, while his mind labored with the quiescent velocity of a spinning top. He had won a big stake over Lauzanne's victory. The race had helped beggar Porter, and brought Ringwood nearer his covetous grasp.
"No smoother than he," she murmured at last. The sound of her own voice smote her, the thing that she had said. As her head flung up she encountered in a mirror her own reflection. She stared, transfixed, at her image; her moist, curling mouth, her dusky cheeks and eyelids drooping down. Then she closed her eyelids tight to shut it out. She groped and found the light and snapped it off.
Curling above one of the wild gorges that cut the lower slopes of the Tetons was a thick black smoke, which, when lifted by a passing breeze, obscured the precipices half-way to the summit of the peak. Had the Grand Teton become a volcano? Certainly no hunting or exploring party could make a smoke like that. But a word from the leader of the party of horsemen explained the mystery.
Miss Jemima felt by instinct that her brother was keeping something back. She shot at him a keen, swift glance, and then resumed the peeling of the potato just then in hand, which operation she effected with such extreme care, that it was a very attenuated strip of peeling which fell curling from her knife into the brown water in the bowl beneath.
There could be no possible doubt as to this last, for there was a thin, bluish-white vapour of steam curling up through the gratings which closed the hatchways, the effluvium emanating from which was almost unendurable.
She paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a curious burnished tone. Swish! Thud! She faced the woods quickly.
'He says besides, she observed, with a slow curling of her lip, 'that his master, as he hears, is coasting Spain; and this done, is away to gratify his seafaring tastes till he is weary. But this is of no interest to you.
He was a man of somewhat leonine aspect as regards the general appearance and expression of the head and face, which accorded well with the large and massive build of the figure, and to which a superbly curling white beard added not only picturesqueness, but a certain nobility.
Block and Curling had declared that it was as good as settled; the money would be saved, and there would be, out of the £20,000 which he had inherited, something over £4000 for him; so that he need not return to India. He was in very high spirits, and did not speak a word of his father's iniquities. "Oh, Walter, what a joy!" said Mary, with the tears streaming from her eyes.
He was somewhat short, and broad-shouldered, and stout, with a frank, open, and ruddy, though sunburnt countenance; his large black sparkling eyes, beaming with good humour, spoke of the southern clime which gave him birth, as did his black curling moustache, and hair of the same hue.
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