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Then she leaned against the trunk of an old apple-tree, and would not come any further. "Are you ill?" said Lettice, gently. Again the half-heard "No," but this time accompanied by a sob. "Then why are you out at this time, and with your poor little baby, too? Have you walked far to-day?" "From Thorley." "Do you live at Thorley?" "Not now." "Where do you come from?" "London."
"Your ladyship is in the humour to give guesses." She gave a swift reply to some only half-heard remark by her next-hand neighbour, then whispered to him, "It's the second time you have been cruel to me to-day. You seem bent on making me unhappy, and it is not what you promised. Am I not looking nice?"
During the watches of the ensuing night, amid bellowings of wind in the chimneys, long-drawn complaint of the great cedar tree, rattle of sleet, and those half-heard whisperings and footsteps as of inhabitants long since departed which so often haunt an old house through the hours of dark, Dominic Iglesias' mind, for cause unknown, was busied with reminiscences of the firm of Barking Brothers & Barking, and the many years he had spent in its service.
Color, color, color! Confused tongues, the buzz and babble of a thousand half-heard conversations, the fragments of marching songs! Here was a cross section of the Allied Armies, all of them with but one purpose. How could they fail! The scene had a telling effect upon McGee and Larkin. Wordless, for a few minutes, they stood watching the throng. It was McGee who spoke first.
It could not be expected that such a beautiful girl as Sara could cross the campus several times a day, and pass unobserved by the hundreds of students who felt this to be their special stalking-ground; and finally, one morning when an unusual number of graceless young "Sophs" and "Freshes" were on guard there, she was subjected to so many stares, smiles, touchings of the hat, and half-heard remarks, that she entered the workroom with flushed cheeks and a perturbed manner which could not well escape the professor's keen eyes.
The room was very still and dim, but the clamour in her brain unnerved her, and she sat up among the cushions, looking vacantly about her with the blue, confused eyes, the direct, unseeing gaze of a child roused by a half-heard call. The call low, imperative, sustained continued softly persistent against her windows the summons of the young year's rain.
Everything was very peaceful the long slant of a sunbeam through dust motes, the buzz of an early bluebottle, the half-heard activities of some of the servants in the pantry beyond, preparing for the rush of the cocktail hour. Suddenly Johnny raised his head and pricked up his ears. "What the deuce is that!" he exclaimed.
"Leave me alone," the latter answered peevishly, muttering some half-heard explanation, looking out as he spoke for a chance of darting across: "I was following a divine creature, in a straw hat, a milliner's wench, with her flaxen hair down her back; that cursed cart has blocked my way.... She has gone on ahead, she is at the other end of the bridge by now!"
"No song of bird nor any drone of bees, Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze: The air was stagnant all, and Silence was A living thing that breathed among the trees. "Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom, Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb. With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.
From below, half-heard in her drowsiness, a colloquy in the pidgin-German of the farmers who have forgotten the Old Country language without learning the new: "Hello, Barney, wass willst du?" "Morgen, doctor. Die Frau ist ja awful sick. All night she been having an awful pain in de belly." "How long she been this way? Wie lang, eh?" "I dunno, maybe two days."
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