Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
She salaamed to Sophy with both hands, and Sophy, who had never before beheld such an apparition, gazed in admiring silence; the ayah's carriage, her gait and sheeny protuberance, recalled to mind a prosperous pouter pigeon.
He knew that the ayah's husband sold the Colonel's soda-water, paraffin, matches, candles, tobacco, cheroots, fruit, sugar, etc., at a little portable shop round the corner of the road, and of the terms on which the hamal and the butler supplied these commodities to the ayah for transfer to her good man.
"Oh, I know," Stella said. Yet she hung over the ayah's shoulder, for to-night of all nights she somehow felt that she could not tear herself away. There had been a change during the day a change so gradual as to be almost imperceptible save to her yearning eyes. She was certain that the baby was weaker.
I kissed and fondled her dark cheeks as gladly as if they had been fair and ruddy, and oftener than I touched my mother's, which were like the petals of a china rose. My most intimate friends were of the Ayah's complexion. We had more than one "bearer" during those years, to whom I was greatly attached. I spoke more Hindostanee than English.
Baby lies silent in the Ayah's lap staring at the ceiling. He clasps a broken toy with wasted fingers. His Bearer comes with some old watchword of fun; Baby smiles faintly, but makes no response. The old man takes him tenderly in his arms and carries him to the verandah; Baby's head falls heavily on his shoulder. The outer world lies dimly round Baby; within, strange shadows are flitting by.
And the repetition of the ayah's last words gave utterance to a sense of wrong that Molly nourished against her present rulers and against the world in which she was not understood. That same day Mrs.
Towards babies in the care of another Ayah she has no charity; they are the brood of a rival hen and she would like to exterminate them. Again, we must love and hate, if we live at all. The Ayah's horizon is not wide, her sentiments are neither numerous nor complex, and her affections are not trained to lay hold of the abstract or the historical.
She was firm-lipped and, to outward seeming, brave as she was beautiful. Even when the door resounded twice to the sharp blow of a saber-hilt, and the ayah's pock-marked ebony took on a shade of gray, she stood like a queen with an army at her back and neither blanched nor trembled. "Who is that, ayah?" she demanded.
She remained motionless for a long second, gazing at the tiny, waxen face on Daisy's breast. And for that second her heart stood still; for she knew that the baby was dead. From the closed room across the passage came the muffled sound of the ayah's wailing. Daisy made a slight impatient movement. "Stir the fire," she whispered. "He feels so cold." But Muriel did not move to obey.
He held out his hand to Ralston who took it and thumped him on the back by way of acknowledgment. "You're growing up," he remarked with approval, as Tommy went his way. "There is nothing more to be done," said Peter with mournful eyes upon the baby in the ayah's arms. "Will not my mem-sahib take her rest?" Stella's eyes also rested upon the tiny wizen face. She knew that Peter spoke truly.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking