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If he pleased her, his fancy pictured him the warm flash of her large eye, the smile of her mouth, half-proud, half-tender, a look which even when but imagined made his pulses beat. "I do not know her face well enough," he said, "to picture all the beauteous changes of it, but there will sure be a thousand which a man might spend a life of love in studying."
He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable. Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from which he sought to pick a word or two as one plucks a violet from a posy. At last a half-tender, half-whimsical look came into his face, and picking his pen out of his hair, he wrote merely "Marianne."
It was too late for Maggie to speak now; the drawingroom door was opening, and Minny was already growling in a small way at the entrance of a tall gentleman, who went up to Lucy and took her hand with a half-polite, half-tender glance and tone of inquiry, which seemed to indicate that he was unconscious of any other presence.
Vital comfort it seemed to me then: I read them in after years; they were kind letters enough pleasing letters, because composed by one well pleased; in the two last there were three or four closing lines half-gay, half-tender, "by feeling touched, but not subdued."
"I'm sorry for her like the little mermaiden of Hans Andersen, she is ready now to dance upon knives for the possession of a soul! Well, she'll win her soul all right, but God grant the winning of it doesn't end in tragedy!" He stood for a moment gazing into vacancy with a half-tender, half-cynical smile on his lips.
Her presence had hitherto chiefly roused in him the half-amused, half-tender feelings of one who strokes a foal or calf, watching its soft uncouthness; now, about to say good-bye to her, there was the question of whether that was the only feeling. Miranda, stealing out between her master and his visitor, growled.
Tim had developed amazingly. He seemed instinctively to recognize her moods, adapting himself accordingly, and in his thought and care for her there was a half-playful, half-tender element of possessiveness that sometimes brought a smile to her lips and sometimes a sigh, as the inevitable comparison asserted itself between Tim's gentle ruling and the brusque, forceful mastery that had been Garth's.
But she did not say no or shake her head as she had done. She glanced up at him with a half-tender smile and seemed to rejoice in the assurance he gave that he did not drink. It was clear that she would have said yes if she had not sworn never to have anything more to do with men. Finally they reached the door and went out of the place, leaving it crowded to overflowing.
She would have had him contented, but he was not so to be contented. There was a little struggle, much silent entreaty from him, much consideration from her above him her doubting, judging, discriminating eyes, her smile, half-tender and half-scornful; but in the end he kissed her lips, the more ardently for their withholding.
She gave a half-timid, half-tender look at him and signalled to her ladies to withdraw. She herself remained behind, superintending the removal of the feast; keeping a motherly eye, too, on the poor boy and his claret. Ever since that one dreadful Sunday morning when she had found him asleep in full evening dress upon his bedroom floor, Mrs.
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