United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Neal shrank back into the shadow of the window seat and watched. Finlay swaggered across the floor and then paused and looked at Donald Ward, who smoked his pipe in the chimney corner. Then he turned to the other two. "I don't know this gentleman," he said. "Is he ?" He paused, his eyebrows elevated, his face expressing significant interrogation. Neal saw him plainly in the lamp light.
"Neal," said the other, turning quickly. "What brings you here? God, man, you mustn't stay. My father is in the house and Lord O'Neill. Thank God the rest of them are gone." "What brings you and your father to Antrim, Maurice?" "There was to have been a meeting of the magistrates of the county here to-day.
Look at me, Neal, how wasted, fleshless, and miserable I am. You know how my garments have shrunk in, and what a solid man I was before marriage. Neal, pause, I beseech you; otherwise you stand a strong chance of becoming a nonentity like myself."
But Molly Brownwell, with what composure she could, said, "Adrian is sick, Neal I can't I can't leave him now." And she called after Neal as he ran toward the door, "Tell them, Neal, tell them why I can't come." There was a hum of voices in the air, and the sound of a gathering crowd.
They'll be coming on soon, and then it won't do to be talking." "Ay, but you mustn't look at me while I tell you." Neal turned away and waited. He was impatient of this making of mysteries in a moment of extreme peril. "I would I were in Ballinderry, I would I were in Aghalee, I would I were in bonny Ram's Island Trysting under an ivy tree Ochone, Ochone!"
The next day the tailor took in his clothes; and from time to time continued to adjust them to the dimensions of his shrinking person. The schoolmaster and he, whenever they could steal a moment, met and sympathised together. Mr. O'Connor, however, bore up somewhat better than Neal. The latter was subdued in heart and in spirit, thoroughly, completely, and intensely vanquished.
With some groping, the kettle was found; it was filled, and the party started for camp. "I heard the distant challenge of a bull-moose a couple of hours ago," said the guide, as they went along. "I never suspicioned he was attacking you; but after the camp was a' ready, and you hadn't turned up, I got kind o' scared. I left Neal to tend the fire and toast the pork, and started out to search.
So he hid all the next day in his offices, and that evening took Neal Ward on a special train in his private car, on a roundabout way home to Sycamore Ridge. It was a wretched homecoming for so great and successful a man as Barclay. Yet he with all his riches, with all his material power, even he longed for the safety of home, as any hunted thing longs for his lair.
He ascribed Hal's unease and preoccupation to a more definite cause. Sedulous in everything which concerned his "Boyee," he had learned something of the affair with Esmé Elliot, and had surmised distressfully how hard the blow had been: but what worried him much more were rumors connecting Hal's name with Milly Neal. Several people had seen the two on the day of the road-house adventure.
The fate of that ghostly, big-eyed creature will be forever one of those mysteries which Neal Farrar would like to solve. Whether the heavy bullet intended for deer laid him open which is improbable or whether it didn't, nobody had a chance to discover.
Word Of The Day