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There was no snow as yet up here at Dare, but wild tempests shaking the house to its foundations, and brief gleams of stormy sunlight lighting up the gray spindrift as it was whirled shoreward from the breaking seas; and then days of slow and mournful rain, with Staffa, and Lunga, and the Dutchman become mere dull patches of blurred purple when they were visible at all on the leaden-hued and coldly rushing Atlantic.

Was that Christianity, civilization? The Count, pursuing some other line of thought, broke out into a kind of Delphic rhapsody: "Folly of men! The wits of our people have been blunted, their habits bestialized, their very climate and landscape ruined. The alert genius of the Greeks is clogged by a barbaric, leaden-hued religion the fertile plains of Asia Minor and Spain converted into deserts!

He heard the beat and suck of waves upon a shore, and in a little while the mists cleared as if at a word, and there before him Arthur saw a lonely lake or sea, hedged round with salt-rimed reeds and sedges, and stretching out its waters, dull and leaden-hued, to so great a distance that his eye could see no end. 'What is this place? he asked of Merlin.

"I can see them carrying out the chaplain's reading-desk on the Indiana." The press-boat pushed her way nearer into the circle of battleships until their leaden-hued hulls towered high above her. On the deck of each, the ship's company stood, ranged in motionless ranks.

Louis sat back in his chair as he spoke, his blotched gums showing in a grin between his thin lips, his dull eyes half veiled by the drooping of the leaden-hued lids. More than ever he was a mask of death, but of a death that possessed a grim humour, malevolent in its satirical cynicism. The justice of the King.

The smooth, oily current of the river, leaden-hued and cold in the light of the early spring, hurried by on its way to the lake, swiftly, yet without the turmoil and fuss of lesser power.

Overhead it hung like a vast canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe of fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the horizon diffused a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass. Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder; in a minute, a louder, angrier growl as if the first were a menace which had not been heeded.

The nurse sat beside the fire, watching the flames flicker on the dark walls, and idly wondering if the leaden-hued sky portended a snow-storm. Her musings were broken by the voice of the invalid, very faint, but quite distinct, "Nurse! nurse! Call my sons. I am dying!" Mrs. Clark ran to the bed. "Quick! quick!" cried Mrs. Blount. "Do not stop for me. You cannot help me now.

On the opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became clear on the left as far as the blue slate eaves of the Hotel de Ville, and on the right as far as the leaden-hued dome of St. Paul.

From the far-spreading, leaden-hued heavens a thick mist fell like a mourning shroud.