United States or Republic of the Congo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Standing there, half-frenzied by her helplessness, she caught again a sound of vehicles and hooves on the cobbles of the street below. A carriage was approaching. It drew up with a clatter before the fencing-academy. Could it be Andre-Louis returning? Passionately she snatched at that straw of hope. Knocking, loud and urgent, fell upon the door.
"Then, my lord," said Varney, "I first request of you to lay aside the wild, suspected, and half-frenzied demeanour which hath this day drawn the eyes of all the court upon you, and which, but for the Queen's partial indulgence, which she hath extended towards you in a degree far beyond her nature, she had never given you the opportunity to atone for."
"A terrible thing, Miriam," said Hilda, growing paler than before. "Do you see it written in my face, or painted in my eyes?" inquired Miriam, her trouble seeking relief in a half-frenzied raillery. "I would fain know how it is that Providence, or fate, brings eye-witnesses to watch us, when we fancy ourselves acting in the remotest privacy. Did all Rome see it, then?
Genuine Egyptians could not understand what the question was, or who was really calling forth disturbance. The chaos was increased by half-frenzied zealots, who, running about the streets naked, wounded themselves till the blood flowed, and cried, "Woe to Egypt! Impiety has passed its measure and the hour of judgment is coming! O gods show your power over the insolence of injustice."
Then a hall door thrust open and a half-frenzied man with disordered dress staggering out. Then the startled face of a young girl all in white and a cry no one ever forgot: "Oh, Robert! Not again?" Her long ride home in the dead of the night, Nancy alone in the coach, her escort a distant cousin on horseback behind. Then the pursuit.
"Must I look in his face and tell him a lie?" was her half-frenzied thought. "I cannot, I cannot! And the whole truth he will never, never know." Dropping her head, she answered, in one word "Yes!" "And, with a woman like you, to love once is to love for evermore?" Again Olive bent her head, and that was all.
A moment's delay might cost the man his life. Grenfell ran. Over that five miles of broken country he ran as he had never run before, with the half-frenzied fisherman leading the way. The wounded man was a young fellow of twenty. Dr. Grenfell knew him well. He was a hero of the world war.
He had been too terrified to notice the direction in which he had drifted even if he had possessed the ordinary knowledge of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which ran away.
Astonished, yet appalled, he thrust his shoulders into the aperture, as if to dare the demon that tormented him, and was met by the carpenter endeavouring to escape. In the struggle that ensued, the lantern was dropped into the water, leaving the half-frenzied combatants contending in the dark. The groan was renewed, when the truth flashed on the minds of both.
Probably it was neither, but an eccentricity, an almost monomania, that has grown upon him, perhaps the result of strong religious excitement. And, having been a backslider, he is cursed with a half-frenzied humor. In the morning he talked in the same strain at breakfast, while quaffing fourteen cups of tea, Eliza, all the while, as she supplied him, entreating him not to drink any more.
Word Of The Day