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If he could have read her mind, have seen behind the film of thought that clouded her eyes, one fears Mr. Anisty might have lost appetite for an excellent luncheon. For she was studying his hands, her memory harking back to the moment when she had stood beside the safe, holding the bull's-eye.... In the blackness of that hour a disk of light shone out luridly against the tapestry of memory.

The reporters allowed their imaginations to run wild. The story was what is known, in the parlance of the newspaper world, as a "space-eater." City editors turned their best men loose on it and devoted columns to conjecture. There was little definite information upon which to base the daily stories that were luridly hurled into type.

Neither was Sitka Charley. All three were frightful-looking. There was no flesh to their faces; their cheekbones were massed with hideous scabs which had cracked and frozen alternately under the intense frost; while their eyes burned luridly with the light which is born of desperation and hunger. Men so situated, beyond the pale of the honor and the law, are not to be trusted.

No one mentioned the fact that he had been hurt; it was not spoken of, though they wished mightily he would tell them the story they had read luridly in the public prints. They were very good to him. One of them, in particular, a handsome, dark, kind-eyed girl, constituted herself at once his cicerone in Rouen gossip and his waiting-maid.

He could bear it no longer, the contrast was too painful, he must break the sweet charm, the hallowed song, for the sky was reddening yet more luridly behind him, and each moment he expected to see Dorchester burst forth into flames. O what a Christmas night! He blew the horn, and had to blow it again and again before he was heard. At length a solitary serf came to the gate: "Who is there?"

I have met men who worked for my brothers in the lumber woods of Wisconsin down among the yellow pines of the Arizona Desert. All that was back in the decrepit and languid and hopesick nineties. It was then you could see the skies of Southern Manitoba luridly aflame at night with wheat stacks it didn't pay to thresh. Came a turn of the wheel! Was it Destiny or Providence?

After a course of American "tough" fiction, of which "Susan Lenox" remains most luridly in the memory, I had a terror of all professional upholders of the law.

A moment more, and the vivid glare of the fires flared luridly through the wild tangle of the undergrowth. Against this red glare many black shadows the dark forms of the firemen could now be indistinctly seen moving like evil spirits around the smoking, flaming pits. It was a wild, strange sight, wild and strange enough to fire a cooler fancy than David's.

This was perfectly true, and yet it was probably by being all she could dream of about her what had paralysed his proper gallantry. Its effect had been not in what it simply stated, but in what, under his secretly disintegrating criticism, it almost luridly symbolised.

The simple card was her dark light, as a handkerchief, a flower, a knot of riband, has been for men luridly illuminated by such small sparks to fling their beams on shadows and read the monstrous things for truths. Her purer virgin blood was, not inflamed. She read the signification of the card sadly as she did clearly.