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The "gush" of the horses' nostrils sounded refreshingly in his ears as the animals fairly danced over the smooth, icy trail. The sleigh-bells jangled with a confused clashing of sounds in response to the gait of the eager beasts. But Grey thought little of these things. He thought little of anything just now but his intended despoiling of the owner of Lonely Ranch.

"What's the matter with you, Jim?" shrilled his mother, whose perpetually jangled nerves were capable of strange dissonances. "Anybody'd suppose you wasn't pleased at having the old Bolton place sold at last, and a little bit of all that's been owing to us since before your poor father died, paid off. My! If we was to have all that was coming to us by rights, with the interest money "

He sat at the piano and the keys jangled under his touch; he got up and walked again. He was waiting for her to come down; he was shaping in mind the words which would greet her before she had come fairly to the bottom of the stairs. Gloria turned into her own room, locking the door behind her. She looked at herself in her glass; she was pale, her eyes looked unnaturally big and brilliant.

The jangled impressions were like split threads of consciousness, misery-wracked and tenuous. They were widely separated. His brain seemed to crack into a million needle-pointed shards, that made no sense except to indicate the passage of time. A month? A century...?

A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the silence of the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of complaint, were "disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse." The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church roused a furious controversy.

He ran downstairs, encountering on his way some of the hotel servants, who even thus early had commenced work, for your industrious Frenchman is no laggard in the morning. Going to the hall-porter's office he found that functionary snoring peacefully. The poor fellow was evidently tired out, and twenty telephone bells might have jangled in his ears without waking him.

The jangled feminine nerves were yet vibrating far above their normal pitch; she was overwrought and oversensitive, for just as a fanatic rushes eagerly upon the fire and the steel, preferring the more exquisite torture, so Lloyd sought out the more painful situation, the more trying ordeal, the line of action that called for the greatest fortitude, the most unflinching courage.

After a while a seemingly interminable while the siren shrieked, the bells jangled loudly in the wet air, another day had come. Could she face it even the murky grey light of this that revealed the ashes and litter of the back yard under the downpour?

There were days that were not so, when the strings jangled aimlessly, and seemed to have no soul in them; days when it appeared that the cloud could not lift, as though light and music together were dead in the world but these days were few; and Paul growing active and strong, caring little what he ate and drank, tasting no wine, because it fevered him at first, and then left him ill at ease, knowing no evil or luxurious thoughts, sleeping lightly and hardly, found his spirits very pure and plentiful; or if he was sad, it was a clear sadness that had something beautiful within it, and dwelt not on any past grossness of his own, but upon the thought that all beautiful things can but live for a time, and must then be laid away in the darkness and in the cold.

Archer drew a thick satisfying partaga from his case, and handed it down, with half-a-dozen wax vestas. Then he cantered after his men, and the old soldier leaned back against the rock and drew in the fragrant smoke. It was then that his jangled nerves knew the full virtue of tobacco, the gentle anodyne which stays the failing strength and soothes the worrying brain.