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He kept steadily along the trail that followed the line of fence to the lane that led directly to the farm-building, and pushed open the front gate as Cressy's light dress vanished round an angle at the rear of the house. The house of the McKinstrys rose, or rather stretched, itself before him, in all the lazy ungainliness of Southwestern architecture.
Gould pulled herself in, and, blotted out in a far corner, thought vaguely of asking May not to dance more than three times with Fred Scully; May chattered to Alice or looked impatiently through the misted windows for the familiar signs; the shadow of a tree on the sky, or the obscure outline of a farm-building that would tell how near they were to their destination.
'Miss Foster's as strong as Samson! or ought to be. What follies has she been up to? 'Please, Reggie hold your tongue! You shall talk as much nonsense as you please when once we have started the poor child off. And Eleanor too ran forward. Manisty had just put together a rough mounting block from some timber in the farm-building. Meanwhile the other two ladies had been helpful and kind. Mrs.
With a penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which were to be found in that pastoral world the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged their pathetic wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the stormy seas"; the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold; all the pathetic episodes of their humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune, their poor pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so hardly in the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each other, in their darkened houses, or at their early toil.
I turned round and saw a great yellow flare illuminating the sky in the direction of Sailly, the fiery end of some barn or farm-building, where a high explosive had found its billet. We remained in this spot for nearly a quarter of an hour, after which R d's platoon began to move on, and I followed at a good distance with mine.
The house, to which I now naturally directed a glance of much more careful scrutiny than before, was no ordinary farm-building, but a rambling old mansion, made conspicuously larger here and there by jutting porches and more than one convenient lean-to.
But it often happened that there was no recreation, but only the excitement of danger in the night-time job of bringing in the firewood for day-time chopping. It would happen that a man had spotted in some shelled house or fallen farm-building a beam, plank, door, or something else wooden and burnable, that he couldn't carry without assistance, or that he couldn't stop to bring away at the time.
And yet, with all their gaiety, as its last triumphant note in truth, they were ready to trifle with death, welcoming, by way of a foil to the easy character of their days, a certain luxurious sense of danger the night-alarm, the arquebuse peeping from some quiet farm-building across their way, the rumoured presence in their neighbourhood of this or that great military leader delightful premonitions of the adventurous life soon to be their own in Paris.
There was therefore a good deal of wading to be done; but the road was an embankment, there was little current, and in safety at last they ascended the rising ground on which the farm-building stood. When they reached the yard, they sent Gibbie to find shelter for Crummie, and themselves went up to the house.
And sure enough, there in the dim light behind the farm-building, gathered in a group round the tea-baskets, laughing, and talking eagerly with each other, or with Aristodemo, was the whole lost party the two ladies and the two men. And beside the group, held by another peasant, was a white horse with a side-saddle. Manisty called. The new-comers turned, looked, then shouted exultant.
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