United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They attempted to get some information from Keith as to the appearance of the robber; but Keith failed to give any description by which one man might have been distinguished from the rest of the male sex. "Could they expect a man to take particular notice of how another looked under such circumstances? He looked like a pretty big man." Wickersham was able to give a more explicit description.
"Why, once let him get his nose into that paint-box, an' he don't know anything not anything. Why, I wouldn't trust him with a baby rabbit if I cared for the rabbit. Besides, he don't like to be with Keith, nor see him, nor think of him. He feels so bad." "Humph! Well, if he does feel bad I don't think that's a very nice way to show it. Not think of him, indeed!
Well, they had both made their unwilling attempts at reconciliation; and they were still further estranged. They were not loving one another; they were just quarrelsome and unhappy at being able to find no safe road of compromise. Jenny had received a bitter shock; Keith, with the sense that she was judging him harshly, was sullen with his deeply wounded heart.
In another moment Keith had opened the box. Inside was a carefully folded slip of paper, and on this paper was written a single line. Keith's heart stopped beating, and his blood ran cold as he read what it held for him, a message of doom from Shan Tung in nine words: "WHAT HAPPENED TO DERWENT CONNISTON? DID YOU KILL HIM?"
At this she pouted prettily, as became a bride, and he pointed out that as Keith Rickman was a poet his greatness was incommensurable with that of her husband, it left him undisturbed upon his eminence as the supreme master of prose. So that Mrs. Rankin smiled dimly and deferentially as an elegant hostess must smile upon a poet who has kept her waiting.
"What things?" queried Keith, as he carefully unwrapped the precious roots from their thin bark covering. "Why, this splendid bear-skin rug on the floor; that large wolf skin on my father's cot, and those pictures on the walls; they do not belong to us." "Do you mind very much, Miss Radhurst? If you are offended I'll take them away, for it was I who brought them here."
Then, after a quiet month, things began to happen, for one afternoon when Challoner had driven over to Hazlehurst with his nephew, Foster came in from the station, bringing a newspaper. The party was sitting in the conservatory; Mrs. Keith talking to Challoner, Millicent and Blake standing close by, but there were no other guests, and Mrs. Chudleigh had left some weeks earlier.
That was no sprig of blood-red bell-heather, but a bit of real heather of the common ling; and it was set amidst a few leaves of juniper. Now, the juniper is the badge of the Clan Macleod. She wore it next her heart. There was laughter, and wine, and merry talking. "Last May a braw wooer," the band played now; but they scarcely listened. "Where is your piper, Sir Keith?" said Lady Beauregard.
Fortunately the disciplinarian was away most of the day and Keith was running wild around the island. This was not possible without some protests from his mother, who regarded all water outside of a tub with deep distrust.
She saw why she had refused Stanley, why she had stopped "borrowing," why she had put off going to the theatrical managers, why she had delayed moving into quarters within her diminished and rapidly diminishing means. She had been counting on Donald Keith. She had convinced herself that he loved her even as she loved him.
Word Of The Day