Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
Two or three girls extended their hands to him Sylvia Quest, shy and quiet; Muriel Wye, white-skinned, black-haired, red-lipped, red-cheeked, with eyes like melted sapphires and the expression of a reckless saint; and his blond sister, Naïda, who had arrived that afternoon from the Tappans' at Iron Hill, across the mountain.
Whatever it might prove to be, this mysterious shadow of a dead man, there could be no doubting what it now meant to her. His eyes were filled with a love unutterable. "Naida, as you have asked it, I will go; but I go better, stronger, because I have heard your lips say you love me. I am going now, my sweetheart, but if I live, I shall come again.
"I distinctly claim the right, for the reason that I possess the right, and no one has ever yet known me to relinquish a hold once fairly gained. Lieutenant Brant, if I am any judge of faces you are a fighting man by nature as well as profession, but there is no opportunity for your doing any fighting here. This matter is irrevocably settled Naida Gillis is not for you." Brant was breathing hard.
In the growing light Naida looked about her affrightedly. Then, throwing her arms impulsively around Brinn, she kissed him a caress that was passionate but sexless; rather the kiss of a mother who parts with a beloved son than that which a woman bestows upon the man she loves; an act of renunciation.
He recognised Dysart, glorious in silk and powder, perfectly in his element, and doing his part with eighteenth-century elaboration; Kathleen, très grande-dame, almost too exquisitely real for counterfeit; Delancy Grandcourt, very red in the face under his mask, wig slightly awry, conscientiously behaving as nearly like a masked gentleman of the period as he knew how; his sister Naïda, sweet and gracious; Scott, masked and also spectacled, grotesque and preoccupied, casting patient glances toward the dusky solitudes that he much preferred, and from whence a distant owl fluted at intervals, inviting his investigations.
"I am learning that I cannot always do just as I should like, but must content myself with the performance of duty. Shall we not be seated?" There was an embarrassing pause, as though neither knew how to get through the interview. "No doubt you are rejoiced to be sent on active service again," she said, at last. "Yes, both as a soldier and as a man, Miss Naida.
"When I came two weeks ago, the Patriarch was not wholly blind, and he was very kind to me. I learned to love the gentle soul of the man, and in a way, skeptical though I was, I felt his power but I never realized until this afternoon how stupendous, how immeasurable it was." "Let us go to the cottage, then," said Thornton. "Naida, dear, let me help you; it is quite a little distance and "
To run this Murphy to cover remained his final hope for retrieving those dead, dark years. Ay, and there was Naida! Her future, scarcely less than his own, hung trembling in the balance. The sudden flashing of that name into his brain was like an electric shock. He cursed his inactivity. Great God! had he become a child again, to tremble before imagined evil, a mere hobgoblin of the mind?
Afterward few impressions remained; she remembered the roses' perfume, and a very fat woman with a confusing similarity of contour fore and aft who blocked the lines and rattled on like a machine-gun saying dreadfully frank things about herself, her family, and everybody she mentioned. Naïda Mallett, whom she had not seen in many years, she had known immediately, and now remembered.
Brant's mind was a chaos of conflicting emotions, but a single abiding conviction never once left him he retained implicit faith in her, and he purposed to fight this matter out with Hampton. Even in that crucial hour, had any one ventured to suggest that he was in love with Naida, he would merely have laughed, serenely confident that nothing more than gentlemanly interest swayed his conduct.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking