United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Dost thou not think the bees steal a little sweet that ought to go into the fruit?" continued the artful girl, who did not choose that her aunt should question her any further as to the reason of her desire to see Willan Blaycke. "I remember that once Father Anselmo at the convent said to me he thought so.
Victorine called again impatiently; and the next minute she bounded down the stairway, crying, "Why dost thou terrify me so, thou bad Benoit, not answering me when I " She stopped, face to face with Willan Blaycke, and gave a cry of honest surprise. "Ah! but is it really thou?" she said, the rosy color mounting all over her face as she recollected how she was attired.
Willan Blaycke leaned both his arms on the window-sill, and looking into the eyes of Victorine Dubois replied: "Marry, girl, thou hast already fetched me to such a pass that thy voice rings in my ears. I asked thee if it were thou who sang?" Retreating from the window a step or two, Victorine said sorrowfully: "I did not think that thou hadst the face of one who would jest lightly with maidens."
He had brought the child out with him, a little chap, with marvellously black eyes and yellow curls, who wore always the costliest of embroidered coats, which it was plain some woman's hand had embroidered for him; but whether the child's mother were dead or alive Willan Blaycke never told, and nobody dared ask. That the boy needed a mother sadly enough was only too plain.
A most dutiful niece thou hast, Mistress Jeanne!" When supper was over Willan Blaycke walked hastily out of the house. He wanted to be alone. The clouds had broken away, and the full moon shone out gloriously. The great pear-tree looked like a tree wrapped in cloud, its blossoms were so thick and white. Willan paced back and forth beneath it, where he had lain sleeping before supper.
It was Annette Gaspard and Victorine; and at the sound of a horse's feet they both leaned forward and looked down into the road. "Oh, see, Victorine!" Annette cried; "a brave rider goes there. Who can he be? I wonder if he goes to the mill? Perhaps my father will keep him to dinner." At the first glance Victorine recognized Willan Blaycke, but she gave no sign to her friend that she knew him.
She haunted him by day and by night, worse by night than by day, for he dreamed continually of standing just the other side of a window-sill across which Victorine reached snowy little hands and laid them in his, and just as he was about to grasp them the vision faded, and he waked up to find himself alone. Willan Blaycke had never loved any woman.
But this was what Willan Blaycke did, and it is as much a mystery now as it doubtless was then, why he did it, he married Jeanne Dubois, the daughter of a low-bred and evil-disposed Frenchman who kept a small inn on the Canadian frontier. Jeanne had a handsome but wicked face.
Thus we See often hearts of men that by love's glow Are sudden lighted, lifted till they show All semblances of true nobility; The passion spent, they tire of purity, And sink again to their own levels low! The next time Willan Blaycke came to the Golden Pear he did not see Victorine.
It was, as Jeanne had said, a sore thing to Willan Blaycke to be forced to seek a night's shelter in the Golden Pear. "Tut, tut!" said the other, "what odds! It is a whimsey, a weakness of yours, boy. What's the woman to you?" Victor Dubois, who had come up now, heard these words, and his swarthy cheek was a shade darker.
Word Of The Day