United States or Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So far as he was concerned, he told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was the daughter of a swindler or the daughter of a god. He had no doubt that she herself had the spirit and quality of divinity. He had seen it. So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother's civilities but to increase his own. He would go down to Harting and take his leave of these amiable outcasts himself.
I believe her associations with the play were so painful that it would have seemed an evil omen to her to begin a new season with it. 'Was she wise, I wonder? 'I think she did well to follow her fancy in the matter, and she herself has had plenty of time. She was working at it all the weeks she was with us, and young Harting, too, I think had notice enough.
He parted from his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, a little reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived his arrival at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his imagination the natural halo of Amanda. "I'm going round the world," he told them simply. "I may be away for two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I started."
South-east of Harting is the isolated Beacon Hill, once a semaphore station between Portsmouth and London; but instead of taking at once to the heights, the pedestrian should first visit Elsted up on its own little hill, and Treyford a mile farther; both churches are ruined and deserted. A new church with a spire that forms a landmark for many miles, stands midway between the two and serves both.
The chalk hills are continued right across Hampshire, slowly diminishing in height until they are lost in the great plateau of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. Between a fold of the hills lies picturesque Harting in a most delightful situation; an ideal spot for a restful time away from twentieth-century conditions.
He had found himself upon a sandy ridge looking very beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and read finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the evening, at the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat down to consider whether he should go back and spend the night in one of the two kindly-looking inns of the latter place or push on over the South Downs towards the unknown luck of Singleton or Chichester.
They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of this infatuated divine. His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely and transitorily did they ever think of him again.
They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they took his arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew. He must stay in Harting that night. Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for miles and miles....
Whatever had been going on in the less illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been merely to bid South Harting good-bye And in short they would never understand. They would accuse him of the meanest treachery.
The third was to bring Lady Marayne into social relations with the Wilder and Morris MENAGE at South Harting. It did not strike him that there was any incompatibility among these projects or any insurmountable difficulty in any of them until he was back in his flat.
Word Of The Day