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North Liberty, Connecticut, never on any day a cheerful town, was always bleaker and more cheerless on the seventh, when the Sabbath sun, after vainly trying to coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment.
M'Gurk, jubilantly, "it's Ody Rafferty himself. To your sowls! Now you've a great good chance, ma'am, to be gettin' it back. He's the boy 'ill leg it over all before him" for in those days Ody was lithe and limber "and it's hard-set the thievin' Turk 'ill be to get the better of him at a racin' match Hi Och."
Now you tell me it's a lot worse than even I thought." "No, no!" she protested. "I learned what I've told you afterward after I had sent you the note. You must not think " He broke in upon her explanation with a laugh as mirthless as were his hard-set face and despairing eyes. She shrank back from him. "Stop it! stop it!" she cried. "I can't bear it!"
"Let no one say when the enemy came Rufus Gillespie was absent from his citadel!" The wind roared round the house corners like a storm at sea; and the father looked down at me with a strange, quizzical expression. "Ye're a headstrong young man, Rufus Gillespie," said the hard-set mouth. "Ye maun knock a hole in the head, or the wall! Will ye go?" "Knock the hole in the wall," I laughed back.
The hard-set jaw relaxed and his lips melted into a smile under his moustache, and he bent down and kissed her. "Well, what do you suppose I should have thought of them if you had had a whiff of that poison?" "Yes, dear," she whispered in between the kisses, "I see now."
And when Cissy recovered herself she was astonished to find Brother Seabright with every trace of his past emotion vanished from his hard-set face calmly taking up his coherent discourse in his ordinary level tones. The furious struggle of the moment before was over; the chapel and its congregation had fallen back into an exhausted and apathetic silence!
They gave his message to the woman he had loved with all the desperate strength of his dull, yet unchanging nature; and when the man who gave it to her saw her wild, white face and hard-set lips, he blundered upon some dim guess as to what that single word might have been, but the sharpest of them never knew the stubborn anguish that, following and growing day by day, crushed her fierce will and shook her heart.
The beaten earth groaned in hollow misery; the thrusting weight of half a thousand head made its breast ache; its plaintive protest grew into an angry roar like incessant thunder; the dust, sharp-hoof-pounded, rose like a hot breath, and hung foglike over the troubled sea of rocking bodies. Behind, the two horsemen, wide apart like fan points, galloped with hard-set faces.
Ten minutes later she returned, panting, her face pale and haggard, her mouth hard-set. For a moment she stood in silence upon the threshold of the open doors leading to the grounds, her hand pressed to her breast in a strenuous endeavour to calm herself. She feared that her father might detect her agitation, for he was so quick in discovering in her the slightest unusual emotion.
The real one was passed in her quiet chamber, in her long solitary walks, and when she sat with her book, apparently reading. She would look up with blank, despairing eyes, clinched hands, and hard-set teeth when the thought of him and all her loss would steal upon her. Her father had caught many such a look upon her face. She had resolved to live without him, but accomplishment is not so easy.
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