Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
"Dear man, why should we think of him?" broke in Oswyn; "he isn't worth it. Now of all seasons can't we find a topic less unsavoury?" "You don't understand," continued Rainham, after a slight pause in his thin, far-away voice. "I am not thinking of him, or only indirectly. I have found him out, and I should be content enough to forget him if it were possible.
He was beginning to wonder nervously whether Oswyn would fail him, when he heard a knock at the outer door, followed by an unfamiliar step, and the clerk announced that a gentleman wished to see him by appointment on private business. The barrister rose from his seat with a portentous display of polite, awkward cordiality, and motioned his guest into a chair.
He touched on the prospects of the Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new friend out.
She alighted and dismissed her cab, and in the interval which elapsed before her ring was answered by a slovenly little servant, who gaped visibly at the lady's hurried request that her name should be taken up to Mr. Oswyn, she had leisure for the first time to realize the strangeness of her course.
Now, Dick, tell me what you have been doing, and especially all about your Academy picture; I haven't seen even a critique of it. Of course it's a success? Have you sold it?" "Oh, spare my modesty!" protested Lightmark somewhat clumsily, with a quick glance at Oswyn. "It's all right, but we mustn't talk shop."
And as she stood there, wondering, a great wave of colour suffused her white face; the next moment she was gone, but in the light of that pure blush Oswyn seemed to have discovered that her tragical enlightenment was complete. When she turned once more into the street, she had already set herself gravely, with a strange and factitious composure, to face her life.
And his close alliance with Oswyn had, as a natural consequence, debarred him from a real intimacy with any of the other men, who, for the most part younger, cultivated different friendships and different pursuits.
The painter saw that his discretion was larger than he had imagined. If the reading had been disagreeably illuminative and Oswyn believed that under his surface composure he concealed, at least, a terrible wound to his pride he was not going to allow this impression to appear. "I might suggest that this document is a forgery," he said after a moment.
Reaching this point one night, and relapsing, as was his wont, into a vaguer mood of reminiscence, not wholly unpleasant, which the darkness of the quiet room, lit only by the fire of logs, turned at last into drowsiness, he looked up presently, with a sudden start, to find Oswyn standing over him. "I am sorry," said the painter; "I am afraid I have awaked you.
Oswyn contemplated the little bundle with an air of indecision, falling at last into a long reverie, his thoughts wandering from the letters to the child, the woman who had written them, the woman whose name his friend so rarely breathed, whose face he had seen for the first time, proud, and cold, and beautiful, that very afternoon. Did she, too, care? Would she guard her secret as jealously?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking