Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
Undine waited till their adieux were over; then, opening her door, she seized the astonished masseuse and dragged her into the room. Mrs. Heeny gazed in admiration at the luminous apparition in whose hold she found herself. "Mercy, Undine you do look stunning! Are you trying on your dress for Mrs. Fairford's?" "Yes no this is only an old thing." The girl's eyes glittered under their black brows.
He was musing on these circumstances, not without some anxiety for the progress of his own journey, when suddenly, as he lifted his eyes, he discovered old Mr. Trumbull at the upper end of the apartment, bearing in one hand a small bundle, in the other his dark lantern, the light of which, as he advanced, he directed full upon Fairford's countenance.
Poor Peter's state was betrayed by the irascibility which wreaked itself on a jostling waiter, and found cause for loud remonstrance in the coldness of the coffee and the badness of the cigars; and Bowen, with something more than the curiosity of the looker-on, wondered whether this were the real clue to Undine's conduct. He had always smiled at Mrs. Fairford's fears for Ralph's domestic peace.
She was glad of the interruption: the sense of what she had at stake made her want to pause a moment and to draw breath. The message was a long cable signed with Laura Fairford's name. It told her that Ralph had been taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, that his condition was serious and that the doctors advised his wife's immediate return.
"Am I?" She gave a slight laugh. "It's only a cable from home." "Ralph?" She hesitated. "No. Laura." "What the devil is SHE cabling you about?" "She says Ralph wants me." "Now at once?" "At once." Van Degen laughed impatiently. "Why don't he tell you so himself? What business is it of Laura Fairford's?" Undine's gesture implied a "What indeed?" "Is that all she says?" She hesitated again.
The talk, as at Mrs. Fairford's, confused her by its lack of the personal allusion, its tendency to turn to books, pictures and politics. "Politics," to Undine, had always been like a kind of back-kitchen to business the place where the refuse was thrown and the doubtful messes were brewed.
After drinking it off, he obtained, but could not be said to enjoy, a few hours of troubled slumber. Alan Fairford's spirit was more ready to encounter labour than his frame was adequate to support it.
Fairford's house enabled me to excel, for the purpose of transferring as many scroll sheets as possible to a huge sheet of stamped paper, I have, as I have elsewhere intimated, had hitherto the comfortable reflection that if the record of my misfortunes should fall into the hands of him by whom they are caused, they would, without harming any one, show him the real character and disposition of the person who has become his prisoner perhaps his victim.
"It's outrageous of me to be so late, and I daren't look my son in the face! But I stayed down town to make provision for his future birthdays." He returned Mrs. Fairford's kiss. "Don't tell me the party's over, and the guest of honour gone to bed?"
The old man, accustomed to judge with ready sharpness of the physiognomy of those with whom he had business, did not fail to remark something like agitation in Fairford's demeanour. 'Have ye taken the rue? said he. 'Will ye take the sheaf from the mare, and give up the venture?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking