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Faintly sounds penetrated from the kitchen, and still more faintly from out of doors. Then the rectangle of the door-way was darkened by a man peering uncertainly. The man wore his hat, from which slanted a slender heron's plume; his shoulders were square; his thighs slim and graceful. Against the light, one caught the outline of the sash's tassel and the fringe of his leggings.
But the Stork could not truly sleep, he was so lonely. So he rose, and, flying through the still night air, came again to the Heron's home in the marsh. "Come, my dear," he said. "Come home to your dear husband's house, and I will be good." But the Heron made no answer, pretending to be asleep. So the Stork flew home in a huff. But the Heron could not truly sleep, she was so lonely.
Worries rolled back from me. I responded jovially to Heron's grim quips, and felt more heartily alive than I had felt for years. Having walked swingingly for four or five hours we sat down in a pleasant inn to a nondescript meal, at something like the eighteenth-century dining hour; consuming large quantities of cold boiled beef, salad, cheese, home-baked bread, and brown ale.
The Queen was accustomed to see him at the King's suppers, and at the house of the Princesse de Guemenee, and always showed him attention. One day he made his appearance at Madame de Guemenee's in uniform, and with the most magnificent plume of white heron's feathers that it was possible to behold. The Queen admired the plume, and he offered it to her through the Princesse de Guemenee.
She felt stifling, choking; she knew that, happen what might, she could not remain under her cousin's roof, eat the bread of his charity, for another day. She shuddered as she pictured herself meeting them at the breakfast-table, facing Mrs. Heron's spiteful face, Isabel's tear-swollen eyes, and her cousin John's sanctimonious sermon. She would have to go.
A hackney coach brought up the rear of the cortege, with a man riding at either door and two more following at a distance of twenty paces. Heron's gaunt, ugly face, crowned with a battered, sugar-loaf hat, appeared from time to time at the window of the coach. He was no horseman, and, moreover, preferred to keep the prisoner closely under his own eye.
He then named the gem-cutter Heron, his son Alexander, and his daughter Melissa, the Alexandrian senator Polybius, his son Diodoros, and the wife of Seleukus. He described them as well as he was able. For each one Caesar promised a reward of three thousand drachmas, and for Heron's daughter twice as much, but only on condition of their being delivered up unhurt.
"Stop that woman screaming," came Heron's voice clearly through the night. "Put her and the other prisoner in irons quick!" But while Marguerite expended her feeble strength in a mad, pathetic effort to reach her husband, even now at this last hour, when all hope was dead and Death was so nigh, Armand had already wrenched the carriage door from the grasp of the soldier who was guarding it.
The atmosphere was thick, the aspect of the furniture dusty: Percival Heron's own appearance was not at that moment calculated to insure admiration.
All the more like Balzac's women." Perhaps the elder man had observed Mr. Heron's sensitiveness more closely and clearly than Heron fancied, and was talking on only to give him time to recover his composure. Certainly he talked much more volubly and continuously than appeared at first to be his way. After a while he said, in his usual style of blunt but not unkind inquiry
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