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Not a word was spoken, the men keeping still and walking as if awestricken along by the great green bank, startling the velvet-coated blackbirds, which flew out on either side and skimmed along near the great flowery ditch, and passed over the top a hundred yards ahead.
Thus Violet dwelt, and each day the golden light grew stronger; and from among the crevices of the rocky walls came troops of little velvet-coated moles, praying that they might listen to the sweet music, and lie in the warm light. "We lead," said they, "a dreary life in the cold earth; the flower-roots are dead, and no soft dews descend for us to drink, no little seed or leaf can we find.
When they had gone the round, some this way and some that, they went back to the farmyard, driven away by a friendly flick of the master's handkerchief. Next came the visit of the hen, bringing her velvet-coated chicks to see us. All of us eagerly crumbled a little bread for our pretty visitors.
She was a velvet-coated old lady with a flat white face and two bright birdlike brown eyes which she never took off us. Conversation was impossible, as she had only one tooth, round which her speech whistled unintelligibly, and she hiccuped loudly once in every half-hour. We were most uncomfortable.
Were you to question the crowd, they would tell you the man was Edgar Fay; that, years before, his father brought him, a velvet-coated boy, to Rio de Janeiro; that shortly afterward he died, leaving the son and a baby sister a small fortune; that the sister, being under the control of a mother who had deserted her husband, was never heard of; and that the guardians, finding no coheir, had spent the money on Edgar's education, afterward securing him a position under the Imperial government.
He fancied that the image of Felton was in their minds, just as it was in his, and the farther they advanced the more sinister became the memory of the velvet-coated intruder.
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