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Updated: June 2, 2025
So she slowly disengaged her hand, kissed him again, and with an excuse that she had the menus to write for the dinner-table, went out, leaving him alone. When the door had closed a great sigh sounded through the long, book-lined room, a sigh that ended in a sob. The old man had leaned his chin upon his hands, and his sightless eyes were filled with tears.
As he had not failed to observe, earlier in the day, the book-lined walls of the library were broken, opposite the window, by a panelled alcove where a small table stood, beyond which, against the wall, was a very large and tall grandfather's clock of black and gold lacquer, in imitation of the Chinese designs so popular in the eighteenth century.
The old room, quiet, grave, book-lined, stored with records of old struggles, lent itself with fitness to the papers nowadays. The Greenwood Carys sat about the wood fire, Judith in an old armchair, Unity on an old embroidered stool, Molly in the corner of a great old sofa. Miss Lucy pushed her chair into the ring of the lamplight and read aloud in her quick, low, vibrant voice.
"Why, law, sir! little Kitty has been in Californy a year or more! How did you like the 'rangement of your liber-airy, sir?" inquired Gray, with apparent irrelevance, as he glanced around upon the book-lined walls. "Very much, indeed, Gray! I never had my books so well classified.
I couldn't tell him that. I told him enough. I know I did. He wouldn't have understood!" In his book-lined, "loosely furnished" apartment Sunday afternoon Hastings whittled prodigiously, staring frequently at the flap of the grey envelope with the intensity of a crystal-gazer. Once or twice he pronounced aloud possible meanings of the symbols imprinted on the scrap of paper.
How comfortable it all was; the book-lined walls, the repose and dignity of this beautiful home, with its corps of well-trained servants waiting to minister to one's lightest wants. The secure and sheltered feeling that it gave appealed strongly to the girl, who but a little while ago had enjoyed similar surroundings in her father's house.
"Gone, sir," he said. "Left by the five-thirty express for London." Bryce found himself at eleven o'clock next morning in a small book-lined parlour in a little house which stood in a quiet street in the neighbourhood of Westbourne Grove.
"Why, what's become of Champe?" he inquired, glancing complacently round the book-lined walls. "Ah, you mustn't expect to see anything of Champe these days," replied the Major, waiting for Mrs. Lightfoot to be seated before he drew up his chair. "His heart's gone roving, I tell him, and he follows mighty closely after it. If you don't find him at Uplands, you've only to inquire at Powell Hall."
The chequered bindings of the books, in which the creamy tints of vellum predominated, lined the whole surface of the wall with a delicate sobriety of colour; over the mantelpiece, the picture of the founder of the house a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes and fur and golden necklace seemed to gather up and give voice to all the dignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him; while on the window side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed yews, which rose abruptly about a hundred yards from the house and overshadowed the whole library wing.
"I will wait here," he said. She nodded and went swiftly past him into the room. It was a dark apartment, book-lined, chill of atmosphere, with heavy, ancient furniture, and a sense of solitude more suggestive of some monastic dwelling than any ordinary habitation. The floor was of polished oak that shone with a sombre lustre. Juliet paused for a moment involuntarily upon entering.
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