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Racey stared and forgot his irritation and his headache. The draw was not more than a quarter-mile distant, and he perceived without difficulty that the rider was a woman. She quirted her mount into a gallop, and then seesawed her right arm vigorously. Above the pattering drum of her horse's hoofs a shout came faintly to his ears. He pulled up and waited.
Seated in the corner of an anteroom they drank to one another's health and listened to the raindrops pattering against a window. "Well, how is the auction business, Bob?" asked King. "Not so bad," the junior partner of Selover and Sinton answered.
It wasn't our fault that Gardener tumbled in." As somebody said this, they all heard quite distinctly, "Ha, ha, ha!" and "Ho, ho, ho!" and a sound of little steps pattering behind. But whatever they thought, nobody ventured to say that it was the fault of the Brownie. TILL the next time; but when there is a Brownie in the house, no one can say that any of his tricks will be the last.
And instead of that background of silence in which the pattering footsteps and buzzing voices, the lute-thrumming or rapid scampering of the many night wanderers of Florence stood out in obtrusive distinctness, there was the background of a roar from mingled shouts and imprecations, tramplings and pushings, and accidental clashing of weapons, across which nothing was distinguishable but a darting shriek, or the heavy dropping toll of a bell.
He rode somewhat slowly, for he was evidently in deep thought; and he had arrived about half-way towards Hilda's house when he heard behind quick pattering sounds, as of small unshod hoofs: he turned, and saw the Welchmen at the distance of some fifty yards. But at that moment there passed, along the road in front, several persons bustling into London to share in the festivities of the day.
Venters left his meaning unspoken, but at the suggestion Jane shuddered. The pale afterglow in the west darkened with the merging of twilight into night. The sage now spread out black and gloomy. One dim star glimmered in the southwest sky. The sound of trotting horses had ceased, and there was silence broken only by a faint, dry pattering of cottonwood leaves in the soft night wind.
I was standing in the cabin door looking at the rain drops fall off the house and make little bubbles in the drip, and listening to the pattering on the clapboard roof, when happening to look up, not fifty yards off, I discovered a regiment of Yankee cavalry approaching. I knew it would be utterly impossible for me to get away unseen, and I did not know what to do.
So that night Madame Dalibard visited in vain her niece's chamber: Helen had a reprieve. The following morning was indeed eventful to the family at Laughton; and as if conscious of what it brought forth, it rose dreary and sunless. One heavy mist covered all the landscape, and a raw, drizzling rain fell pattering through the yellow leaves.
After which unexampled dissipation, all went off to rest, promising to themselves and their partners that they would get up at sunrise to sight Sombrero. But, as it befell, morning's waking brought only darkness, the heavy pattering of a tropic shower, and the absence of the everlasting roll of the paddle-wheels.
She dreamt an absurd dream: That she was herself one of those girls with the high pattering accents, playing tennis without ceasing and with apparent cheerfulness; talking just as they had talked, and about just the same things; and all the time, a vast circle of shadowy forms stood watching, beckoning, and exhorting and warning, and turning away, at last, in sorrowful contempt, because she preferred to spend her youth eternally in futilities.
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