United States or Turks and Caicos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Why, little daughter, don't you see the fun of having Christmas under strange conditions?" she asked one evening, when she went to investigate a sound of woe from Fran's room. "No, I don't see any fun in it," replied Frances stubbornly.
With her skirts gathered up in a listless arm till they were unbecomingly abridged, with every muscle and fiber seeming to sag like an ill-supported fence, Fran's thoughts were at the abysmal stage of discouragement. For a time, there seemed in her heart not the tiniest taper alight, and in this blackness, both hope and failure were alike indistinguishable.
Then he said angrily: "Fran, a question it never occurred to me to ask you before." He posed the question. Fran could have answered it with two English words and a numeral, and the same words and numeral that Gail had used. But he didn't have the words. Especially, he did not have the number. Fran's way of writing numbers was as complex as the system used in ancient Rome, and Soames had no key.
Confidences were impracticable, because of a tousled-headed, ink- stained pupil who gloomed in a corner. "Why, hello there, Jakey!" cried Clinton, disconcerted; he had hoped that Fran's subjugation might take place without witnesses. "What are you doing here, hey?" "Waitin' to be whirped," was the defiant rejoinder.
I was told that her uncle had cast her off, and she had disappeared. It seems that she'd made friends with a class of people who were not who were not respectable." Fran's eyes shone brightly. "Oh, they were not," she agreed, "they were not at all what you would call respectable. They were not religious." "So I was told," he resumed, a little uncertainly. "There was no way for me to find her."
"Suppose I were in Fran's place would I have kept the secret to spare man or woman? No! Fran doesn't care a penny for your wife. She couldn't. It would be monstrous unnatural. But she's always hated me. That's why she acts as she does to triumph over me. I see it all. That is the reason she won't have the truth declared she doesn't want me to know that you are are free."
Fran's "happiest day" soon dawned, for not long after the Orgueil picnic, she and Edith were walking down one of Jersey's lovely lanes. Enclosed by high ivy-covered earthen banks, it ran, a straight white road between green walls, and so narrow that at regular intervals, little bays were provided that carriages might pass.
There was danger in such a confirmation, for it carried Abbott beyond the limits that mark a superintendent's confines. As he stood on the bridge, holding Fran's hand in a warm and sympathetic pressure, he was not unlike one on picket-service who slips over the trenches to hold friendly parley with the enemy.
Why had he held Fran's little hand? He had never dreamed of holding Grace's ah, there was a hand, indeed! "Has she been sent down?" Bob asked, in the hoarse undertone of a fellow-conspirator. "No." Abbott was eager to prove his innocence. "I haven't seen a sign of her, but I'm looking every minute glad you're here."
Fran's eyes still burned, but he regarded Soames with definite respect. Perhaps there was even liking. And Soames held up the recovered necklace for Linda Beach to see, though she was then still before the camera. She was a seasoned performer.
Word Of The Day