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The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian. She welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-room.
It has fallen on them, and they must go. The reason?" Again came that meditative head-shake. "It's God's will. So be it." Murray drew a deep breath. He was less impressed by the priestly view than with the implication. "Driving them out?" he questioned, his curious eyes searching the wise old face. "It seems that way. Mrs. Mowbray won't pass another winter here.
When the evening came and the students were marching and the teachers, save Miss Smith, were sitting rather primly apart and commenting, she entered the room. She was a little late, and a hush greeted her. One boy, with the inimitable drawl of the race, pushed back his ice-cream and addressed it with a mournful head-shake: "Go way, honey, yo' los' yo' tas'e!"
This enquiry, however, scarce pulled up her mother. "No though she HAS, no doubt, hitherto wasted plenty of labour. She has now a dozen boxes I could see them there in her wonderful eyes just waiting to be called for. So if you're counting on her not going, my dear !" Mrs. Brook gave a head-shake that was the warning of wisdom. "Oh I don't care what she does!" Nanda replied.
Then a low groaning howl burst from him; he laid the dead thing in her lap, and threw himself on the floor at her feet in an abandonment of self-accusation and despair. It was long before he was able to give her an intelligible account of what had taken place. She asked him if he had found it dead. In answer he could only shake his head, but that head-shake had a whole tragedy in it.
Her procrastinating head-shake was prettier than ever, yet it had never meant so many fears and pains impossibilities and memories, independences and pieties, and a sort of uncomplaining ache for the ruin of a friendship that had been happy. She had liked him if she hadn't she wouldn't have let him think so! but she protested that she had not, in the odious vulgar sense, "encouraged" him.
While his negative head-shake revived my drooping spirits, his words afterwards sent them to zero once more. I hardly knew whether to feel relieved or otherwise. It would have been far better had the soldier curbed his tongue, because his final words kept us on the rack of suspense. We were hustled out of the room. As we passed out I glanced at the clock.
Betton had reverted only once to the subject to ask ironically, a day or two later: "Is Strett writing to me as much as ever?" and, on Vyse's replying with a neutral head-shake, had added with a laugh: "If you suspect him you might as well think I write the letters myself!"
Robert Grant Burns had not been serious; he had been testing Jean's originality. "Well, what will we call it, then?" "Oh, we'll call it " Jean nibbled the rubber on her pencil and looked at him with that unseeing, introspective gaze which was a trick of hers. "We'll call it does it hurt if we use real names that we've a right to?" She got a head-shake for answer.
Geoffrey Dawling accepted as a gentleman the event his evening paper had proclaimed; in view of which I snatched a moment to nudge him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrum his hand. He returned me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriage would henceforth strike him very much as the traffic of the street may strike some poor incurable at the window of an hospital.
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