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Here, under the circumambient, sparkling clearness, coolness and silence, Joan stood with strange medley of thoughts upon her soul. The saints and the fairies mingled there with visions of Nature, always smiling, with a vague shadow of one great God above the blue, but dim and very far away; and a nearer picture which quickened her heart-beat: the picture of "Mister Jan."
There are those who tell us how they can explain every heart-beat, quick or slow, when aught ails them. I never could. I only know that standing on the steps of Mary Snow's house the night before, all my thought was of Mary Snow sitting at the window and looking down the street after Hugh Glynn. And "God help you, Simon Kippen!"
What made you hesitate when that fellow told you with his eyes to murder me?" "How did you know?" "How? The glass. See over yonder. I could watch every expression on both your faces. What was it what was it, child, that made you oh, if you owe me a single heart-beat of gratitude, tell me the truth!" "You've said it yourself." "What?" "That line we read the other night about 'the luckless Pot'."
Every muscle of it was relaxed and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be better to let it die...?" O'Connell did not seem to hear her. He waved an impatient hand for her assistance. "Outside my experience," he muttered, "no heart-beat discernible, no breath ... yet it is indubitably alive." He depressed the soft, plastic ribs and gave the feeble heart a gentle squeeze.
The fellow lay in a heap, his flesh warm, but with no perceptible heart-beat, no semblance of breathing. My fingers sought his face, and I could scarcely suppress a cry of surprise he was not Estada. Who then was he? What could have been his purpose in thus invading this stateroom?
Yet he so managed that, even if their thrusts appeared simultaneous, there was between them an interval, brief as a heart-beat, but long enough for him to dispose of one and turn on the other, or escape one and pierce the other. I could not credit my own eyes.
And yet, even while I say this, tones and words of hers, heard only to-day, come sighing to my ears, giving to every heart-beat a quicker impulse." "Ah! Then you have seen Miss Loring to-day?" "Yes," answered Hendrickson, in a quick, and suddenly excited manner.
It was with another quick heart-beat that he awoke next morning, for his first thought was of Valentine. The sun already gilded the towers of Notre Dame, the clatter of workmen's sabots awoke sharp echoes in the street below, and across the way a blackbird in a pink almond tree was going into an ecstasy of trills.
And, as I walk through these long, grey streets, lined with flaring market-stalls and massed thick with people, I seem to feel a great throb, a living heart-beat, that speaks to me of humanity; and what these bustling streets hold of humanness, of the warmth and energy of life, comes to me like a flowing tide. The pain, too, I feel; for there are odd, pathetic episodes.
Many a time in early summer when out-of-doors she would be reminded of it by hearing some bird sounding its love signal on a piece of dry wood that tap of heart-beat. Now it crashed close to her ear. Such strength came back to her that she rose as lightly as though her flesh were but will and spirit.