United States or Brunei ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Percival means all the happiness of my life," he said. So the child received his name, and the fact was announced to Mr. Thorne in a letter brief and to the point like a challenge. Communications with Brackenhill were few and far between. From the local papers Alfred heard of the rejoicings when James came of age, quickly followed by the announcement that he had gone abroad for the winter.
Percival came down to earth with the greatest promptitude: "It's a beautiful place. I'm glad to see it. I like looking over old houses." "Like looking over old houses? As if it were merely a show! Isn't Brackenhill more to you than any other old house?" demanded Mr. Thorne. "Oh, well, perhaps," Percival allowed: "I have heard my father talk of it of course." "Come, come!
If she love me, this believe, I will die ere she shall grieve; and he vowed that never was man so forsworn as he. Yet his one desire had been to be true. Had he not worshipped Truth? And this was the end of all. His cruelty, too, had been worse than useless. He had lost this chance of an independence, as he had lost Brackenhill.
She sang well, and Percival, by the fireside, noted the young fellow's evident pride in her performance, and admired the pair. The morbid depression of a couple of months earlier had passed, and left him far more like the Percival of Brackenhill. "You sing," said Bertie, looking back. "I remember you were great at some of those old songs. I'll play for you: what shall it be?"
His reply to her entreaty that he would come back to her had been exactly what she had feared as gentle as he himself had been when they stood face to face in the old drawing-room at Brackenhill, and as inflexible. If she could forget him if she could learn to care for Captain Fothergill or Walter Latimer what a bright, easy, sunshiny life might yet be hers! No, ten thousand times, no!
Thorne's life the boast of his power over Brackenhill had been on his lips more frequently than the twice a week of which Hammond talked. Of late years it had not been so. He had used his power to assure himself that he possessed it, and gradually awoke to the consciousness that he had lost it by thus using it.
Neither did Percival feel any greater desire for a career of any kind than he had felt a year earlier when he talked over his future life with Godfrey Hammond. If he were asked what was his day-dream, his castle in the air, the utmost limit of his earthly wishes, he would answer now as he would have answered then, "Brackenhill," dismissing the impossible idea with a smile even as he uttered it.
Alfred read his father's feelings correctly enough, but Mr. Thorne was almost repaid for all he had endured when, in his turn, he was able to write and announce the birth of a boy for whom the bells had been set ringing as the heir of Brackenhill. Jim, with his sick fancies and querulous conceit, Mrs.
Then he turned, folded his arms and coolly surveyed Brackenhill itself from end to end. Mr. Thorne watched him, expecting some word, but when none came, and Percival's eyes wandered upward to the soft evening sky, where a glimmering star hung like a lamp above the old gray manor-house, he said, with some amusement, "Well, and what is your opinion?"
The answer was written on the doctor's face. He had known Sissy Langton from the time when she came, a tiny child, to Brackenhill. He shook his head, and murmured something about "even if there were no other injury, the spine " Fothergill caught a glimpse of a hideous possibility, and answered with an oath.
Word Of The Day