United States or Zambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Now, though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace, sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by the pine. "We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!"
With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light. Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!
Then Gareth sent his dwarf on in front to tell Lynette's sister that they were near her castle. And the Lady Lyonors asked the dwarf a great many questions about his master. 'He is a noble knight and a kind master, said the dwarf; and he told the lady of all the adventures they had met on their way to her castle.
It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.
How did you get there? Did your people lose you, or had you run away from home?" The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's cheeks. Her eyes sank under those bold, curious, blue ones of Greta's. She said, with a painful effort: "I had run away from the place that was called my home. I don't remember ever having lived anywhere else before." "My! And ...?" "It was a dreadful place."
The Mother had never seen her thus before. She had been absent from the scenes of Lynette's little social triumphs. Now a great tenderness swelled in her bosom, and a great pity gripped her throat, and wrung the bitter, slow tears into her eyes. "She is happy," she whispered in her heart.
The grey light of dawn was filtering down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the chinks in the tarpaulins overhead. A formless pale figure came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart beating wildly in her throat. "Dearie!" The whisper was Sister Tobias's.
The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's. "You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!" Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric: "Go on!"
Lips came close to her ear, and breathed: "Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to be married to ..." "Yes?" "Has he been told? Does he know?" The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the greying light she could see it clearly. Her heart beat in heavy, sickening thuds.
And yet and yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past. Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision?
Word Of The Day