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Faquita sat beside her with bowed head. An aged crone brewed herbs over a stove. The dingy little house faced the hills and was dimly lighted by the fading rays of the sun struggling through the dark pine woods. "Holy Mary, Faquita!" said Francesca, in a loud whisper. "Does Liseta die?" Faquita sprang to her feet. Her cross old face was drawn with misery.
But the strangeness of the presence there of such a light took so great a hold on his imagination, and it was such a rare thing to see what the musty dingy little closet, which to Cosmo had always been the treasure chamber of the house, was like, that he stood for a moment with his hand on the cover of the bureau, gazing into the light-invaded corners as if he had suddenly found himself in a department of Aladdin's cave.
"And now for the seed!" he interrupted joyously. "And then the Silver Fleece!" That night, for the first time, Bles entered Zora's home. It was a single low, black room, smoke-shadowed and dirty, with two dingy beds and a gaping fire-place.
They affect one the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum" very much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future.
"If every other fellow grumbled at the bill of fare which greeted us at many of the dingy taverns, Lincoln said nothing." But his complacency was of the surface only. His ideas were his own. He held to them with dogged tenacity. Herndon was merely the first of several who discerned on close familiarity Lincoln's inward inflexibility.
Besides, the churchyard was really of some interest, since it was undoubtedly the "exciting cause" of the obnoxious paragraph two of the will. I accordingly expressed a desire to make its acquaintance, and we crossed to the entrance to Gray's Inn Road. "Do you ever try," she asked, as we turned down the dingy thoroughfare, "to picture familiar places as they looked a couple of hundred years ago?"
She looked around at the little, stuffy room, and thought of all her girlish day-dreams of the sweet hopes she had had of soon leaving those dingy four walls, and of having a little bower of a cottage to call "home," with a handsome young husband all her own to love her.
It is an incident worthy of note that this examination took place and the commissioner's decision was rendered in the same dingy little room where, in the olden days, fugitive slaves were examined and returned to their masters.
They were also to be presented to native gentlemen and rajahs, who have as quick an eye for the outward man as any people in the world. And while those showy costumes even in so trifling a matter as the attendance on a shooting-party exhibited the taste of the people in those matters, why should the Englishman exhibit his own, in dingy shooting-jackets and soiled trousers?
In the latter place of residence men are contented to sleep in dingy closets, and to pay for the sitting-room and the cupboard which is their dormitory, the price of a good villa and garden in the suburbs, or of a roomy house in the neglected squares of the town.
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