United States or Vanuatu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Could the good women, whose kind hearts had prompted them to proffer their sympathy, have heard these words they would not have been likely to obtrude any more on the hard, cold woman who held them in such low estimation. Mrs. Preston took the lamp in her hand, and began to explore her husband's desk.
She betrayed girlhood then all the quick sympathy, the wonder, the sweetness of a heart innocent and untutored. She looked at him with great, starry, questioning eyes, as if they had just become aware of his presence, as if a man had been strange to her. "Thank you. It's good of you to be sorry," he said. "My instinct guided me right. Perhaps you'll be my friend." "I will be if I can," she said.
Her companion, a gray-haired, elderly lady, was, of course, Mrs. Pierce. She was trembling with the excitement of the occasion, and seemed to depend on Florence Lloyd's strong personality and affectionate sympathy to keep her from utter collapse. Mrs. Pierce was of the old school of gentlewomen.
Each knew how great was the other's loss, and in sympathy with another's grief found consolation for her own. The visitors remained at Oakland for several days, as the lady wished to have her son's remains removed to the old homestead in Delaware. She was greatly distressed over the want which she saw at Oakland for there was literally nothing to eat but black-eyed pease and the boys' chickens.
No, the ladies had not retired; they were still downstairs. Perhaps my face betrayed the miserable truth; perhaps some chord of sympathy passed from me to them I know not. They jumped up and came forward with a sudden fear in their eyes. I had already bidden them farewell, and they did not expect to see me again, until I rode from the city in the morning.
Sometimes they got on her nerves; more often they made the good tears come. Once she was reading a tattered volume of George Eliot which she had picked up during a stroll on the quays, and calling him over to her side pointed out a sentence: "Dogs are the best friends, they are always ready with their sympathy and they ask no questions."
Vague thoughts of sympathy and divine goodness permeated her soul. Life at worst or best was beautiful had always been so. These thoughts did not come to her all at once, but through the months during which she watched and waited. It was a wonderful thing to be a mother, even under these untoward conditions. She felt that she would love this child, would be a good mother to it if life permitted.
Go to it, and let Mother sit here, laziness." Kirk sighed again, a tremendous, pathetic sigh, designed to rouse sympathy in the breasts of his hearers. It roused none, and he wandered across the room and dragged an enormous book out upon the floor.
The love and sympathy which bolstered up my faith in him were reinforced by his gentle breeding and high mental quality; but circumstances forced me reluctantly to admit that the story he told when he first came was not true. And why? The question sat on the foot of my bed at night and made faces at me, scrawled itself all over my work and met me around every corner.
"I'll do my best for thee," she said, gently, "for I feel for thee and with thee, as if thee were my own son. But I wish thee to remember now and always that the only true strength comes from Heaven." Soul and body are too nearly related for one to suffer without the other's sympathy. Mrs. Yocomb mercifully shielded me that evening, merely saying that I had seen enough company for one day.
Word Of The Day