United States or Germany ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Gilian did not hear it, but Miss Mary felt it sting to her very heart, and she moved away, pressing upon her favourite's arm to bring him with her. "We must be moving," said she; "Peggy will be scolding about the dinner spoiled with waiting." But no one else seemed willing to break up the group. Young Islay had become the centre of attraction. MacGibbon and Major Hall, the Sheriff, Mr.
He watched its gambols at the feet of that distressed household, watched its pawing at the fringe, turning round upon itself in playfulness, emblem surely of the cruel heedlessness of nature. MacGibbon moved to the window and stood beside the Paymaster, saying no word, but looking out at the vacant street, its causeway still shining with the rain.
Bob MacGibbon he was Captain in the 79th leaned forward and tried to put his hand upon the child's shoulder, not unkindly, but with a rough playfulness of the soldier.
And now that MacGibbon did not see and the Cornal had blurred eyes upon his brother's boyish countenance, she felt free to caress, and she laid the poor hand against her cheek and coyly kissed it. The General turned his look upon her wet face with a moment's comprehension.
"He was a strong, fine, wiry man in his time," said MacGibbon, looking over his shoulder at this end of a stormy life. "I mind him at Talavera; I think he was at his very best there." The Paymaster looked, too, at the figure upon the bed, looked with a bent head, under lowered eyebrows, his lip and chin brown with snuffy tears.
No magician but only the brother looked over an untidy scarf and a limp high collar at the delirious man in bed. The Paymaster stood at the window frowning out upon the street; MacGibbon coughed in short dry jerky coughs, patted with a bony hand upon the coverlet, turned his head away. A stillness that was like a swoon came over all. "Is that you, mother?"
That attracted all his attention. He gave a glance at the people at the door the inn-keeper, MacGibbon, with an unusual Kilmarnock bonnet on that seemed to have been donned in a hurry; Rixa, in a great perturbation, having just come out of a shandry-dan with which he had been driving up Glen Shira; Major Paul, and Wilson the writer.
Spencer tilted his London hat down upon his brow, fumbled with his fob-chain, and would have liked to ask the Paymaster if his well-known intention to send Gilian on the same career he and his brothers had followed was to be carried into effect But he felt instinctively that this was a delicate question. He let it pass unput. Bob MacGibbon had no such delicacy.
The Major's mind was wandering over the plains of Waterloo to guess by the vacancy of his gaze; on his left Bob MacGibbon smoked a black segar, the others talked of townsmen still in the army and of others buried under the walls of Badajos.
The same day at their meridian in the "Abercrombie" he broached the topic. "I'll tell you what it is, Captain: if that young fellow of yours is ever to earn salt for his kail, it is time he was taking a crook in his hand." "A crook in his hand?" said the Paymaster. "Would you have nothing else for him but a crook?" "Well," said MacGibbon, "I supposed you would be for putting him into Ladyfield.
Word Of The Day