United States or Sudan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In the smart victoria sat a lady alone. She was dressed in white, and wore a great, black picture-hat. Lewis glanced at her face. He recognized the Anglo-Saxon pallor. Out of the dead-white shone two dark eyes, unnaturally bright. He raised his hat. "I beg your pardon," he began in English. The gate had swung open. The horses were plunging on the taut reins.

In some parts of the town pinched faces and wan cheeks were frequent; and one group consisting of an elderly man with his wife and two daughters especially attracted my attention. Their faces were dead-white, as if they had been living below ground for years, and the dull, stunned look of misery in their eyes was terrible to see; obviously they had not yet fully realised their deliverance.

To some dusky landing before a shabby Parisian quatrième, to an open door revealing a greasy antechamber, and to Madame leaning over the banisters, while she holds a faded dressing-gown together and bawls down to the portress to bring up her coffee. Miss Spencer's visitor was a very large woman, of middle age, with a plump, dead-white face, and hair drawn back a la chinoise.

I saw the pale visionaries, a circle of black-robed figures, with dead-white bands, like coffin-cerements, across their brows. I saw them almost unanimously fat, with pendulous jowls and black and broken teeth, as remote from any expression of mystic fervors and spiritual espousals as could be well imagined, "Vieilles commères!" grunted my paysanne, who was evidently neither amiable nor saintly.

"Devon and the sight of that boy. That'll put the pep back, unless I'm the original nut. And if he doesn't care about her now, he may presently. Others have." And when she went in, there was Tootles staring at the wall, and through it and away beyond at the place Martin had called the Cathedral, and at Martin, with his face dead-white because Joan had turned and gone.

"That is a falsehood," breathed Leighton, tensely, "I am going to thrash you until you remember." Leighton saw his boy's frail body shrink, he saw a flush leap to his cheeks and fade, leaving them dead-white again. Then he looked into his son's eyes, and the hand with which he was groping for the cane stopped, poised in air. In those eyes there was something that no man could thrash.

Above these color-bands, the dead-white mantle of everlasting snow spread its folds, with here and there a black ridge of granite thrusting wind-cleared fangs high above the far-flung shroud. But, if the crests of peak upon peak were thus clothed in white, their bases wore a garment of different texture.

Her manner was very subdued, very quiet; nor did she exhibit any signs of fear; or much of emotion, save to those who were near enough to her to perceive a quiet, silent, and undemonstrative tear steal occasionally down her dead-white cheek.

Her thought fell away into the vague, the inarticulate, though she did not sleep. Still there was a temporary suspension of volition, of conscious mental activity, which, in a degree, rested her. Persons, passing now and again, looked with curiosity at the brilliant figure, and inscrutable eyes in the dead-white face.

Cosgrave banged the table with his clenched fist. His freckles were like small suns shining out of his dead-white face. "You you leave me alone, Stonehouse. I I'm n-not a kid any more. And I d-don't pretend. Connie knows I haven't a c-cent in the world except what poor mother sneaks out of the housekeeping. But I'm s-sick of living as I've done always grinding, always afraid of everything.