United States or Lithuania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then had come his acquaintance with Linda's school-friend. He looked back through the years. At first he had scarcely noticed her visits. Gradually he had become conscious of a dim feeling of thankfulness to the woman who always seemed able to soothe his invalid wife.
She thought that no child had ever had such a strange attitude to a deceased parent as hers to Mr. Moze. She had anticipated the inquest with an awful dread; it proved to be a trifle, and a ridiculous trifle. In the long weekly letter which she wrote to her adored school-friend Ethel at Manningtree she had actually likened the coroner to a pecking fowl!
At the present moment, however, it was not anxiety as to their own affairs that occupied the mind of Annie Melville, near enough as that might have lain; it was the unhappy condition in which the imprudence of a school-friend almost her only friend had involved herself by her hasty marriage with a man who, up to the present moment, had shown no faculty for helping himself or the wife he had involved in his fate, and who did not know where or by what means to procure even the bread of which they were in immediate want.
"The life I have led," he resumed, "accounts, perhaps, in some degree, for what is deficient in me. At school, I was not a popular boy; I only made one friend, and he has long since been numbered with the dead. Of my life at college, and afterward in London, I dare not speak to you; I look back at it with horror. My school-friend decided my choice of a profession; he went into the navy.
One day he fell in with a school-friend, Cornelius of Woerden, who had recently entered the house of Augustinian canons at Steyn, near Gouda. In his loneliness any friend was welcome. He paid visits to Steyn and saw that the life there offered leisure and even possibilities of study; Cornelius, too, seemed inclined to be a ready companion in literary pursuits.
His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter on the subject of The Faerie Queene to a school-friend, in which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, he remarked 'I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded me extraordinary pleasure.
I followed her without delay. Teresa, meanwhile, argued the price of butter and cheese with an old school-friend, now elevated to proprietorship of the shop, and we knew that this would take at least a quarter-of-an-hour. We soon arrived at a place where they sold novelties, and where the clerks were about ready to close for the night.
There was a little mischievous girl in the company, who giggled and said, "Betty's in a bad key to-day; her sweetheart has vexed her surely." It was a trivial remark, but I went off with it in my mind. A strange interest in the moods of this old school-friend had begun to stir me.
Claude kept carefully to the letter of his promise, and avoided as much as possible the society of the two girls. He shared the quarters of an old school-friend, Paul d'Auxhillon, and rarely went on deck when it was at all probable that the women would be there.
The stiff folds of her silken skirts formed an angle, and there the cat crouched hour after hour, a silent, white, waiting thing. And the waves ebbed and ebbed away, and I waited too. One afternoon, as I sat by my grandmother, the servant entered with a letter for me just arrived by the post. I took it up. It was from Willoughby, my school-friend.
Word Of The Day