Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
The windows were fast-closed and the curtains half-drawn. The man who stood upon the hearthrug was of medium height, dark, with close-cropped hair and a black, drooping moustache. His first glance at his visitor, as the door opened, was one of impertinent curiosity. "Madame?" he inquired. "You are Monsieur Estermen?" He bowed. He was very much impressed and he endeavored to assume a manner.
"Look at my ship," said the child, crossing his hands on Magdalen's knee. She was not usually patient with children. In happier days she would not have met the boy's advance toward her as she met it now. The hard despair in her eyes left them suddenly; her fast-closed lips parted and trembled. She put the ship back into the child's hands and lifted him on her lap.
On bright summer evenings the swallows whizzed as before about the corner gables, but no more merry eyes looked down from the balconies to the green meadows and richly laden apple trees in the valley. But just now two merry eyes were searchingly raised to the castle from the meadow below, as if they might discover something extraordinary behind the fast-closed shutters.
Both man and dog went supperless that night the man inside the cabin before a roaring fire; the dog outside in the cheerless dark before a fast-closed door whither his master had promptly consigned him. Gradually as the days passed there came still another change in the life at the cabin. Rathburn's step became slow, and his cheeks sunken.
The restlessness of body did not equal the restlessness of soul, and the past came back with a startling vividness. The wasted years, the misused talents, and above all, the fast-closed heart against its rightful Owner, now seemed to stand up in judgment against him.
How could I do more than guess vaguely and fearfully at the awful mysteries that might be enacted in the silence and solitude of that fast-closed chamber in which, day and night, he would remain alone with her, the living with the dead, like the potter with his clay, until it should please him to use the dreadful power that was his, and call her back from death to life, perhaps and oh! how horrible the thought was to me! to be the slave of the man who, by his unearthly art, had made himself the master of her new life.
In dark corners of the city through which it was dangerous to travel after nightfall, there were dismal houses, behind the fast-closed doors of which ready orators held the attention of eager listeners. The time was near. The emancipation from their slavery was at hand. What they had heard in the city to-day was proof of it. Be ready! It was the same story wherever men were gathered together.
He stood still, staring before him, and, drawing himself up, swore to himself with fast-closed lips that he would, he WOULD trample a way through, and save things for them both, even yet. The lights were put out, and soon they lay in their separate beds, breathing heavily in the dark. Peer stretched himself out, with his face up, thinking, with closed eyes.
Ahead of him ran a road depressed between worn, hard, bare banks of earth, past a deserted pool, marged with stone, up shining surfaces of outcropping rock, through avenues of clustered tombs, pillars, pagan monuments which were tracks of the Herods, dead and abandoned, splendid pleasure gardens, suburban palaces lifeless and still, toward the looming Tower of Hippicus, brooding over a fast-closed gate.
Up, up, up, they came, until, having reached the summit, they paused. Then we heard the huge, heavy bolts of the fast-closed door shoot back with a sonorous clash.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking