United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Really, Talbot, you amuse me. When you set that dirty hound Gadgem on his trail, what did you expect me to do? invite the dog to dinner? or have him sleep in the house until I sold furniture enough to get rid of him?" The colonel leaned back against the mantel's edge as if for support. All the fight was out of him.
"Ugh, don't!" she said. "I'm burnin' up." He jerked back the scuttle, returning to his chair, and, picking up the fallen newspaper, drew down his spectacles from off his brow and fell immediately back into close, puckered scrutiny of the printed page. "What time is it, Burkhardt? That old thing on the mantel's crazy." He drew out a great silver watch. "Seven-forty." "O God!" she said.
Mantel's pity was deeply stirred, and he would gladly have spared him had he dared; but he did not, and permitting him to regain his breath, he said: "And so you really mean to die without bestowing your pardon upon those who have wronged you?" "I swear it!"
The lumberman turned his searching eyes kindly on Mantel's face and said, "And how is it with thee, my friend; hast thou the peace of God?" The directness of the question startled the gambler. "I have, no peace of any kind; my heart is full of storms and my life is a ruin," he answered sadly. "Did thee never notice," said the lumberman gently, "how nature loves to reclaim a ruin?" "In what way?"
Mantel's footfall, quiet as it was, disturbed the sleeper, who moved, turned his head toward the sound and asked in a husky and but half-audible voice, "Who is there?" "It is I. How are you now? A little better?" said Mantel, laying his soft, cool hand upon the broad forehead, wet already with the death-damp. "I am getting weaker. It won't last long," he answered painfully. "Do you think so?"
Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet.
The old, ironical smile lighted up Mantel's features, and he said: "We seem to have a violent antipathy to thin ice, Davy, and skate away from it as soon as it begins to crack a little beneath our feet." "Yes," said his friend, shrugging his shoulders, "it is not pleasant to fall through the crust of friendship.
Word Of The Day