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An old porter had charge of the premises, and he now beckoned me to follow him to a sort of loft or lumber-room over the office, where he had slung a hammock, which he told me I might sleep in, or I might, if I liked, sleep on the bare boards outside. "The hammock's more comfortable than it looks, young 'un, so I'd advise you to try it," he remarked; and I found his remark true.
He wore a light gray suit, and on the slender white hand that hung down over the hammock's edge was a spark of diamond fire. It seemed to me that I knew his face, although assuredly I had never seen him before. While I groped among vague speculations the Story Girl gave a queer, choked little cry.
With that she reached out one hand to me, with that pretty droop of the left corner of her mouth, that already had begun to fascinate me.... "Help me up ... a hammock's a nice place to be in, but an awkward thing to get out of." I took her hand and helped her rise to a sitting posture. "Ruth's in the little house typing ... Penton and Darrie are a-field taking a walk." I paused where I was. Mrs.
"You are very generous, Phil " "No, I am trying to be truthful. And I say there is no harm in her. I have made up my mind on that score." He leaned nearer his sister and laid one hand on hers where it lay across the hammock's edge: "Nina; no woman could have done what she has done, and continue to do what she does, and be mentally sound. This, at last, is my conclusion."
Shiela, elbow on knee, one arm across the hammock's edge, chin cupped in her other palm, sat staring at vacancy beside the hammock where Virginia lay. And sometimes her partly doubled fingers indented her red lower lip, sometimes they half framed the oval face, as she sat lost in thought beside the hammock where Virginia lay so pale and still.
"The hammock's in the patio," he said. "There's moonlight there, too. No, thank you with Cissy wakeful and her windows commanding every nook!... Besides as I told you, I've been thinking." "And what have you concluded?"
'Now observe me, said Bell. 'I have made the getting into a hammock a study. I first open it very wide at the top with both hands; then, holding it in that position, I gracefully revolve my body from left to right as upon an imaginary swivel; meantime I raise my right foot considerably from mother earth, with a view to passing it over the hammock's edge.
Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh. When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat.
Lysander John Pettengill, had ridden off after luncheon to some remote fastness of her domain, leaving me and the place somnolent. In the shadowed coolness, aching gratefully in many joints, I had plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign oblivion.
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