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Zack's approach to the painting-room was heralded by a scuffling of feet, a loud noise of talking, and a great deal of suspicious giggling on the part of the housemaid, who had let him in. Suddenly these sounds ceased the door was dashed open and Mr. Thorpe, junior, burst into the room. "Dear old Blyth! how are you?" cried Zack. "Have you had any leap-frog since I was here last?
Goodworth's announcement of his benevolent intentions towards Zack seemed to have very little effect on Mrs. Thorpe; but she said nothing on that subject or any other during the rest of the dreary walk home, through rain, fog, and mud, to Baregrove Square. Rooms have their mysterious peculiarities of physiognomy as well as men. Now, the parlor of Mr.
"My four golden sovereigns shall be the first he has," thought Madonna, nervously taking the housemaid's offered arm at the house-door. "I will put them in some place where he is sure to find them, and never to know who they come from. And Zack shall be rich again rich with all the money I have got to give him." Four sovereigns represented quite a little fortune in Madonna's eyes.
"You don't mean it!" exclaimed Zack. "Why, it's only January now; and you always used to have your private view of your own pictures, in April, just before they were sent into the Academy Exhibition." "Quite right," interposed Valentine, "but I am going to make a change this year.
"You're fretting about Zack," said the old gentleman, looking round suddenly at his daughter. "Never mind! leave it to me. I'll undertake to beg him off this time." "It's very disheartening and shocking to find him behaving so," said Mrs. Thorpe, "after the careful way we've brought him up in, too!" "Nonsense, my love! No, I don't mean that I beg your pardon.
"No more do I," said Zack, dropping back into his chair in lazy astonishment. "Is it some riddle, Mrs. Blyth? Something about why is Madonna like the Venus de' Medici, eh? If it is, I object to the riddle, because she's a deal prettier than any plaster face that ever was made.
At night, they had ended in the fatal consolation of the brandy bottle in the desperate and solitary excess, which had so cheated him of his self-control, that the lurking taint which his life among the savages had left in his disposition, and the deadly rancor which his recent discovery of his sister's fate had stored up in his heart, escaped from concealment, and betrayed themselves in that half-drunken, half-sober occupation of scouring the rifle-barrel, which it had so greatly amazed Zack to witness, and which the lad had so suddenly and strangely suspended by his few chance words of sympathizing reference to Mary's death.
"Of course, you wasn't a-goin' on from no house o' mine 'thout no breakfast. Why, I say!" Johnnie's throat swelled at the humble kindness. They ate, thanked Roxy and her man Zack in the simple uneffusive mountain fashion, and started away in the twilight of dawn.
"Zack, this isn't any time to split hairs over what the Egyptians had. Come out of the ages, and focus your mind on what I've got!" The old fellow disappeared with a chuckle, still audible after reaching the dining-room. The Colonel, too, was chuckling. "It's all right to laugh, Colonel, and make everybody hate you, but I'll bet we walked forty miles!
Having referred to her husband in these terms, Mrs. Thorpe next reverted to herself. She mentioned the receipt of a letter from Zack; but said it had done little towards calming her anxiety and alarm. Feeling certain that Mr.
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