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At noon a window was opened, and a maid-servant's hand was put out to push back the padded shutters. A few minutes later, Esther, in her dressing-gown, came to breathe the air, leaning on Lucien; any one who saw them might have taken them for the originals of some pretty English vignette.
By that illumination Father Anthony saw two men stripped naked, save for a loin-cloth, and circling each other slowly in the center of a ring which was fenced in with ropes and floored with a padded mat. Certainly Father Victor had spared nothing in expense to make the fittings of the gymnasium perfect. Of the two wrestlers, one was a veritable giant of a Canuck, swarthy of skin, hairy-chested.
An instant later he heard the soft sound of a fur-clad body and padded feet scaling the outer wall behind the hut and then a tearing at the poles which formed the wall. Presently through the hole thus made slunk a great beast, pressing its cold muzzle close to his neck. It was Sheeta, the panther. The beast snuffed round the prostrate man, whining a little.
And next second he had ducked under the bench, and thrust his head through the round hole, so that his skull was brought into contact with some of those padded thumb-screws. "Get the idea?" he finished. "It's a cranium-meter!" It did not take Smith long to reach the next conclusion. "Then," said he, "our friend Estra is connected with their school system.
"Oh!" he ejaculated; and darting back to the bed-side he hurried on his trousers, opened his door, and the next moment his bare feet padded over the polished oak floor as he made for his father's room and thumped at the door. "Father, quick! father!" "Hallo! Any one ill?" cried the squire, for thieves and burglars were known only by repute out there in the fen.
Why not go out to the dim and half-remembered world that he had left, the world of lights, padded floors and marble steps, leave this impossible land with its blood and wrongs? Nay, he could not leave Lost Valley. He was as much a part of it as the grim Rockface itself, the Vestal's Veil eternally shimmering in its thousand feet of beauty. Life or death, for Kenset, it must be here.
"I didn't want us to lose it, this time, and I didn't want to see you lose face around City Hall. Gutchalls, of course, are expendable," Allan said. "But my main reason for fixing Frank Gutchall up with a padded cell was that I wanted to know whether or not the future could be altered. I have it on experimental authority that it can be.
When Dick mentioned the name o' Jack Whitman both o' Jabez' arms fell to his side; an' when Dick spoke o' the Creole Belle his legs shut together like a pocket knife; an' he crumpled down on a little padded bench they had fixed up to kneel on. His face was gray, an' his eyes had a scum over 'em, while his mouth hung open like the mouth of a man dyin' of old age.
On the morning after the election Doctor Smalley rose unusually early, and did five minutes of dumb bells, breathing very deep before his window, having started the cold water in the tub first. At the end of that time he padded in his bare feet to the top of the stairs and called in a huge, deep-breathing voice: "Ten minutes."
I could not help thinking, as I looked at him, of the aged French noblemen we read about, who, at an age and an hour which ought to have found them nightcapped and asleep, nourishing their waning vitality, were dancing attendance in ladies' boudoirs, painted, rouged, padded, and wigged, aping the youth they had parted with so long ago.
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