United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He shut the door quietly and looked at her, an odd look, piercing and grave. "Dead," he said. And when McClane met them he said it again, "Dead." The wounded were being brought down from Lokeren in trams that ran on to a siding behind a little fir plantation outside the village.
Vaguely for a moment she wondered why Billy had come for her and not John; then she was frightened. "Billy John isn't hurt, is he?" "No. Rather not. A bit done up. I made him go and lie down.... Look here, we must get out of this." The McClane Corps were gathered on their side of the messroom.
"They can put us up," he said; "but I've got to break it to you that we're not the only Field Ambulance in Ghent." Charlotte said, "Oh, well, we'd no business to suppose we were." "We've got to share our quarters with the other one.... It calls itself the McClane Corps." "Shall we have to sleep with it?" Sutton said. "We shall have to have it in our messroom. I believe it's up there now."
They greeted her with shouts of joy, but their eyes looked at her queerly, as if they knew something dreadful had happened to her. "You should have stood in with us, Charlotte," Mrs. Rankin was saying. "Then you wouldn't get mislaid among the shells." She was whispering. "Dr. McClane, if you took Charlotte out among the shells, would you run away and leave her there?" "I'd try not to." Oh yes.
She disliked Sutton and McClane for the same reason, but she hated John. He treated her face with a hardness and insolence like her own. You could see her waiting for her revenge, watching every minute for a chance to stick her blade into him. He was pretending that he hadn't heard her. His hair stood up in pointed tufts, rumpled from his pillow.
She did not ask anybody the question, however, just then; but when the postman came around at noon, and she saw the same scene repeated, her curiosity could not be restrained any longer, and she started off to find Jane McClane, for Jane was fourteen years old and knew everything, Polly thought.
They stared before her at the glass door where McClane was entering. He came swaggering and slipped into his place between her and Alice Bartrum with his air of not seeing Mrs. Rankin, of not seeing Charlotte and John, of not seeing anything he didn't want to see. Presently he bobbed round in his seat so as to see Sutton, and began talking to him excitedly.
"I can't see any afterwards." Sutton smiled. "And yet," he said, "there will be one." The boat went steadily, cutting the waves with its sound like the flowing of stiff silk. Charlotte and Sutton and McClane, stranded at Dunkirk on their way to England, had been taken on board the naval transport Victoria.
While they talked they remained aware of the others. They could see McClane rubbing his hands; they heard his brief laugh that had no amusement in it, and his voice saying, "Anyhow, we've got in first." When they came back into the room they found the tables drawn apart with a wide space between.
McClane, if he could, would have taken their fine Roden cars from them; he would have taken Sutton. She knew that Mrs. Rankin would have taken John from her, Charlotte Redhead, if she could. And when she thought of the beautiful, arrogant woman, marching up to the battlefield with John, she wondered whether, after all, she didn't hate her.... No. No.
Word Of The Day