Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
He gave me correctly and with no unwillingness Brunow's address, and told me that the gentleman who chartered him had bidden him to drive first to the Italian restaurant, and then to our ultimate destination. I took the man's number and dismissed him with a handsome gratuity.
But it's no use making any bogus promise." "I suppose you don't mean to lose sight of me?" Brunow asked. "That's the state of the case, sir," the man answered. "H'm!" said Brunow, in a casual tone; "got anybody with you now?" "Sheriff's officer in a hackney-coach down-stairs," the man responded. He had caught Brunow's tone to a hair, and spoke as if the whole thing were the merest casual trifle.
The more I turned the thing over in my mind the more I felt inclined to doubt Brunow's bonafides, and yet our long acquaintance and the downright horrible character of the betrayal which had really been committed made the doubt seem so criminal that I tried to drive it away. The more I refused to harbor it the more emphatically it came back again.
Brunow's man wants to know what I mean by coming with a message like that. He says Mr. Brunow hasn't been at home since half-past six this evening. Mr. Brunow's man, sir," Hinge pursued, "seemed to think I was trying to make a fool of him." "That will do," I answered. "You have obeyed your orders, and that is all you have to think about. Go and wait outside."
If I had never seen that pencilled scrap of paper, I should have had no belief in Brunow's story. But though he was a romancer to his finger tips, and as irresponsible as a baby, I had never known him to take the least trouble to bolster up any of his inventions, or to show the least shame when he was discovered in a lie.
It was not my business to repeat Brunow's stupid follies, and I kept silent. She, however, was not disposed to let me off that way, but pressed me for an answer. "Madame," I was forced to say, "I am not so impertinent as to call your reputation into question for an instant. I will not be so insolent as to sit in judgment upon so delicate a question for a moment.
Perhaps I was absurd enough to fancy the count had seen something in his daughter's manner which led him to believe that she cared for me, and perhaps he had taken advantage of Brunow's proposal to awake me to a sense of my own wasted opportunities. I put that fancy by, for intimate as I had grown to be with Miss Rossano.
I am not exaggerating when I say that if the count had stabbed-me he would hardly have hurt or amazed me more. I had heard Brunow's butterfly protestations about his affection for Miss Rossano, and my eyes had certainly not been less open to his defects of character because he was a rival to my own hopes; but I had never regarded him as being altogether serious.
I was sorry for Brunow, and, little as I valued him, I was grieved that he should nurse his groundless grudge against me; but there was nothing to be done at present. Almost as the cheers which had greeted Brunow's last sentence died away the count came in. He walked straight to the head of the table, and took his seat there.
I had never discerned the faintest hint in her manner of anything but friendship. If my fancy had not been already dead, the count's next words would have killed it outright. "I have nothing," he said, "to guide me to my daughter's feelings, but I am certain of my own. Mr. Brunow's declaration took me by surprise, but I had been expecting yours, and should have received it with pleasure."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking