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But why vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends, that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry! No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed fortieth year!

This was the burden of all she said: nothing mattered, nothing would ever matter again. There was not the least need for the half-jesting tone in which Maurice clothed his air of authority. She obeyed him blindly, doing what he bade her without question, glad to be subordinate to his will. As long as he did not ask her to think, or to feel, or to stir from her chair beside the stove.

He smiled, but there was a sinister glint in his eyes; and as he rode home that night Hardy saw in the half-jesting words a portent of the never-ending struggle that would spring up if God ever sent the rain. On the day after the visit to Carrizo a change came over the sky; a haze that softened the edges of the hills rose up along the horizon, and the dry wind died away.

At times, throughout the week, he had thought of the curious resemblance between Harriet and the girl he had noticed on leaving Waymark's house last Sunday, and now he asked her, in a half-jesting way, whether it had really been she. "How could it be?" said Harriet carelessly. "I can't be in two places at once." "Did you stay at home that evening?" "No, not all the evening."

But even the fact that he had sat in the House of Commons never led any great section of Englishmen to regard him as a figure or an institution. He was generally looked on as one who made his bed aggressively among heretics, as a kind of Rabelaisian dissenter, as a settled interrupter, half-rude and half-jesting.

Here, the first care of the white men was to wash off the paint from their persons, not without a half-jesting objection from the Sagamore. "The two friends of Sassacus," he said, "have Indian hearts; why should they not keep their Indian skins? Let them come with me, and they shall become great sachems over the tribes that listen to the voice of the little salt lake."

Grivois, rather surprised than uneasy at her pug-log's insensibility to her affectionate appeals, and believing him to be sullenly crouching beneath the seat, stooped clown to take him up, and feeling one of his paws, drew it impatiently towards her whilst she said to him in a half-jesting, half angry tone: "Come, naughty fellow! you will give a pretty notion of your temper to these young ladies."

There had even been certain little half-serious, half-jesting talks about the future into which there had entered the subject of a little delicatessen and restaurant in a desirable neighborhood, with Heiny in the kitchen, and a certain blonde, neat, white-shirtwaisted person in charge of the desk and front shop.

Emma's smiling, half-jesting congratulations were nipped in the bud; she felt as she afterwards declared "quite frightened at him." Agatha, too, met him rather meekly, fearing lest she had led him into a position distasteful to his feelings. She was relieved when, taking little notice of herself, he fell into conversation with Mr. Thornycroft a serious discussion on political and general topics.

Sit down, and we will come to business." Both the young men flushed at her half-contemptuous, half-jesting phrase, but they sat down as directed. Mrs. Wilson took her seat directly in front of them, and proceeded to inspect them with cool deliberation. "I am looking you over," she observed calmly. "I must decide what work you are fitted for before I can assign anything to you."