United States or Guyana ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He spent them for the most part within doors, writing for the Prior in the mornings, or keeping watch over the door as his Superior talked with prelates and churchmen within, for ecclesiastical London was as busy as a broken ant-hill, and men came and went continually scared, furtive monks, who looked this way and that, an abbot or two up for the House of Lords, priors and procurators on business.
Before long, however, this furtive little group developed into a good sized crowd of men who assembled at ten o'clock in the morning and continued in session until three in the afternoon. At first they met immediately outside of the Exchange, but later they took up a position south of Exchange Place and close to the office of the Stock Exchange Clearing House.
Public decorum again is, I should say, more noticeable in an American than an English city, and yet both in San Francisco and New York I dined in restaurants not late between 7 and 8 and not furtive hole-in-corner places, where girls belonging to the establishment, wearing almost nothing at all, performed the latest dances, with extravagant and daring variations of them, among the tables.
When he lifted his share of the burden, Roscoe noticed how he watched the officer with a kind of apprehension, almost terror, in his furtive glance, and kept his eyes upon him as they started away in the darkness. Roscoe was in a mood to think ill of Tom, whom he considered the bungling, stubborn author of their predicament. It pleased him now to believe that Tom was afraid and losing his nerve.
He loosened the cinches; so doing he caught from the corner of his eye telegraphed tidings, as his two hosts rolled to each other a single meaningful glance, swift, furtive, and white-eyed. Observing which, every faculty of Pete Johnson's mind tensed, fiercely alert, braced to attention. "Now what? Some more of the same. Lights out! Protect yourself!" he thought, taking off the saddle.
His movements, made with the instinctive cunning of the woodsman and with muscles trained not only by wild life there in the mountains to speed, endurance and exactitude, but by many an hour of stealthy stalking of the "revenuers" sent to search out his moonshine still, raid it, take him prisoner, were almost magically active, cautious, furtive and effective.
The next instant he was out, and "going on" like an Indian; yelling, laughing, chasing boys, jumping over the fence at risk of life and limb, throwing handsprings, standing on his head doing all the heroic things he could conceive of, and keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if Becky Thatcher was noticing. But she seemed to be unconscious of it all; she never looked.
He sat like a man who is perpetually on the qui vive. A furtive light shone in his eyes, he was manifestly uncomfortable. Yet how could a man be safer from espionage than he! Rugby telephoned to Liverpool, and received very much the same answer as Crewe. Euston followed suit. "Who's this you're sending up tonight?" the station-master asked.
There was silence as she concluded her glowing tale. Depression may take hold of the most careless and light-hearted for a moment, and even the attraction of making a good end, with an opportunity of spurning a worthless ordinary, cannot always appeal. The landlady had contrived to make her story vivid, and furtive glances were cast at the individual who occupied the seat she had indicated.
Furtive he was not, yet seeming to crouch for a spring; not savage, yet primed for savagery; not cruel, yet quick on the affront, and on the watch for it. He was neither a rogue nor a madman; and yet he was as cunning as the one and as heedless as the other, if that is a possible thing. He was arrogant, but his smile veiled the fault; you saw it best in a sleepy look he had.
Word Of The Day