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Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music.
He started violently, controlled himself with an effort, and stumbled toward the sound. "What is it?" he whispered. "Who is it? Is anyone there?" A groan answered him. Then a voice, weak and quavering, said: "Gimme a drink! Gimme a drink! Can't none of you God-forsaken devils give me a drink?" He stooped over the bunk. A man was lying in it, crumpled into a dreadful heap.
She is now making a poultice of herbs that she will lay on the wound; or rather on the wounds, for he has no less than four." "I think that he will live, young master," the old woman said in a quavering, high-pitched voice. "'Tis hard to kill an Armstrong. They have ever been a hardy race and, save the lad's father, have ever been prone to the giving and taking of blows.
The red afterglow of the day hung in the western sky. Overhead the stars were venturing timidly out. The camels were at rest, some chewing their cuds, others asleep, their necks stretched full length upon the warm earth. The watchmen in a group talked in low voices. Presently the cry of a muezzin, calling to prayer, flew in long, quavering, swelling notes through the hushed air.
In the stillness of twilight they heard the slow, soft padding of a man's feet laboriously climbing the hill, and listened intently at the unusual sound. "Wonder who that is," speculated Bill, leaning forward and staring at the dim trail. "Looks like a dwarf from here. Some old man of the mountain coming up to drive us off!" "Hello," hailed a shrill, quavering voice. "Be you the bosses?"
It is probable that it never heard the Cheap Jack's softer intonations, for its protuberant bones gave a quiver beneath the scarred skin as he yelled. Then its drooping ears pricked faintly, the quavering forelegs were braced, one desperate jog of the tottering load of oddities, and it set slowly and silently forward.
I remember her "leddyship" then as a thing of black silks and a golden chain, a quavering injunction to me to be a good boy, a very shrunken loose-skinned face and neck, and a ropy hand that trembled a halfcrown into mine. Miss Somerville hovered behind, a paler thing of broken lavender and white and black, with screwed up, sandy-lashed eyes.
He looked into her eyes for an instant, holding himself very erect, and it was a rare event when Sir John looked any one squarely in the eyes, and he said, wonderingly, "How I loved you!" "I know," she murmured. Sylvia Vernon gazed up into his bloated old face with a proud tenderness that was half-regretful. A quavering came into her gentle voice.
Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found it, faltering. Go on! Do! Sonnez! Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes. Sonnez! Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.
The others drew round the door and stooped to listen; a moment, and the sound they feared reached their ears the grinding of steel, the trampling of leaping feet, now a yell and now a taunting laugh. The sounds were too much for one of the men who heard them: he beat on the door with his fists. 'Gentlemen! he cried, his voice quavering, 'for the Lord's sake don't, gentlemen!
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