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Five minutes later Rathburn strode down the trail alone, while behind him, on the other side of the fast-shut cabin door, barked and scratched a frantic little yellow dog. Tuesday night, when Rathburn came home, the first sound that greeted him was a joyous bark, as a quivering, eager little creature leaped upon him from out of the dark.
I had vainly endeavored for months to find the flaw in his armor of dissimulation; I had but broken not one dagger, but twenty against the plates of that cuirass. If I had had all the tormentors of the Middle Ages at my service, I could not have forced his fast-shut lips to open, or extorted an admission from his woebegone and yet impenetrable face.
It was beautiful, but he had seen beauties by the score; beauties of all lands and of all grades, high and low. It was not Elsie's beauty which had so strongly moved him, although it was of a type which he especially admired. It was an expression a something that was wistful and tender in the eyes a look as of one who was waiting before the fast-shut door of paradise.
Was the 'change' quite so monstrous, so meaningless? How often, indeed, he remembered curiously had he seemed to be standing outside these fast-shut gates of thought, that now had been freely opened to him. He drew ajar the door, and leant his ear to listen.
The unwonted sweetness of the air, the long, twining sun-shadows of late afternoon, the intense, country stillness, all of them helped the oppression of memory, till gradually he began to feel himself enwrapped in a shimmering, elusive mist of half-real dreams. He perceived that the windows were fast-shut, double-paned, their cracks stuffed with the customary winter moss.
Was it here she was to lose the sapphire, and him? She looked vaguely around the room, at the most impassive aspect of the place, as at a place she never expected to leave; the darkening windows, the fast-shut door, the child leaning on the desk, watching them with sharp, incurious eyes this would be her niche for ever. She would be left for ever with the crusts and the dregs.
Whenever the coals were swept out of the oven, and Miss Fortune had made sure that the heat was just right for her purposes, Ellen was sent out of the way, and when she got back there was nothing to be seen but the fast-shut oven door. It was just the same when the dishes, in all their perfection, were to come out of the oven again.
The room was now a glare of light, and in this glare of light the broad bed with its white counterpane and sheets stood out harshly enough. The sheets were turned smoothly down under the blue chin of the dead man, who lay there upon his back, his face with fast-shut eyes dusky white, or rather grey, among the pillows. As Julian looked upon him he exclaimed: "Good God, it isn't Marr!
The door was fast-shut; the curtain was half-drawn before the window, shutting out the long-tarrying June twilight; the three men had been there together for four hours, and as yet nothing of importance had transpired, and no word had been spoken. The other hand fumbled continually in his breast, as if he kept something hidden there. Granger wondered what it was.
These finished and the sheets of manuscript were printed, eighteen months later, almost without change he caught a sudden fever of entomology: hunted daily for specimens, but preserved, eventually, only six of his captures: a moth, silver and green; a butterfly of steely, iridescent blue; a solemn, black-coated cricket; a bee bound round with the five golden rings of Italy; a tiny, rainbow-hued humming-bird, found dead in a fast-shut moon-flower; and, finally, a slender, bright-winged dragon-fly.
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