United States or Estonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes of a happy accord of face and spirit.
"Look look!" he cried, clutching me by the arm; "here, where we stand, is the very spot from which my boy fell! And below yonder is the valley!" Even as he uttered the words, the dogs halted and came towards us, looking wistfully into St. Aubyn's face, as though they fain would speak to him.
There was silence among us for a moment, then St Aubyn's boy spoke. "Father," he asked, tremulously, "shall I not see that good Gluck again and tell the monks how he saved me, and how Fritz and Bruno brought you here?"
Godolphin, who had arrived with his men during my Master's colloquy, was ready with an offer of wains and pack-horses to convey the bulk of it to the outhouses at Godolphin. But this, when I interpreted it, the Portuguese captain would not hear. Nor was he more tractable to Mr. Saint Aubyn's offer to set a mixed guard of our three companies upon the stuff until daybreak.
He was dripping wet, and carried, strapped across his broad back, a double pannier, the contents of which proved on inspection to consist of three flasks of goat's milk, and some half dozen rye loaves packed in a tin box. The friendly expression and intelligent demeanour of his visitor invited little St. Aubyn's confidence and reanimated his sinking heart.
Some of them are behind me. Don't you feel a wind?" "Indeed I don't," said St Aubyn. "There's not a breath stirring anywhere." They were standing side by side. Austin gently put out his right hand and grasped St Aubyn's left. "Now don't you feel anything?" he asked. "Yes a sort of thrill. A tingling in my arm," replied St Aubyn. "That's rather strange. But it comes from you, not from " He paused.
The truth was that his attention was taken up with something wholly different. The allusions to his unknown mother that had been made by Lady Merthyr Tydvil, and the cropping-up of the same subject during St Aubyn's visit, had somehow connected themselves in his mind with the mysterious appearance of the strange lady at the garden gate on the evening of the tea-party at the vicarage.
A hound kept beside her, shivering and now and then lowering his muzzle to sniff the oreweed, as if the brine of it puzzled him: a beast in shape somewhat like our grey-hounds, but longer and taller, and coated like a wolf. The present cause of her gestures we made out to be a dark-skinned fellow whom two of Saint Aubyn's men held prisoner with his arms trussed behind him.
He had deposited the money, but the notice accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn's letters. It would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....
"It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I'm not responsible for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know; and I'm very fond of Margaret Aubyn's books. I was reading 'Pomegranate Seed' when we first met. Don't you remember? It was then you told me all about her."
Word Of The Day