Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
Then he saw May Deane walking slowly across the field, close to an abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him. She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently, turned, and began to approach him.
But when Tom Bowcock came out of the little sitting-room three hours later, after Lennard had told him of the approaching doom of the world and had explained to him how his pit-shaft was to be used as a means of averting it should that, after all, prove to be possible his interest in the war had diminished very considerably, for he had already come to see clearly that this was undeniably a case of the whole being very much greater than the part.
He had an impulse to seize her in his arms and kiss her, but prudence suggested that he should defer the rite. She turned and began to walk slowly and meditatively towards the pit-shaft. He followed almost at her side, but a foot or so behind, waiting for her to speak.
I went out, same night as you went off, to seek you, and coming home from Aunt Jenny's I seed a summat shining on the road near the old pit-shaft, for moon were up then; it were this knife o' yourn. I picked it up, and oh, Sammul, there were blood on it, and I saw the bank were trampled, and oh, I didn't know what to make on it. I feart ye'd been and kilt yourself.
"Well," continued Samuel, "I hadn't made up my mind just what to do, but I were resolved as I wouldn't bide at home any longer, so I hurried along the road till I came to the old pit-shaft. I were just a-going to pass it by, when I bethought me as I'd like to take a bit of holly with me as a keepsake.
"You're the finest girl I've ever met, anyhow," said Mr. Scales with gallant emphasis, and he dug his stick into the soft ground. She blushed and made no answer. They walked on in silence, each wondering apprehensively what might happen next. Suddenly Mr. Scales stopped at a dilapidated low brick wall, built in a circle, close to the side of the road. "I expect that's an old pit-shaft," said he.
One thing, he then found, had been dimly haunting his thoughts ever since he heard it: Leopold affirmed that he had thrown his cloak and mask down an old pit-shaft, close by the place of murder: if there was such a shaft, could it be searched?
She leaned despairingly on the table. She would not undress. She would not move. She had to realize her position; she had to see it. Folly! Folly! Fancy a commercial traveller throwing a compromising piece of paper to the daughter of his customer in the shop itself: that was the incredible folly with which their relations had begun! And his mad gesture at the pit-shaft!
And as he waited, expectant, he looked at her profile and reflected how well the name May suited her, with its significances of shyness and dreamy hope, and hidden fire and the modesty of spring. And while he was thus savouring her face, and they were still ten yards from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his vision, as it were by a conjuring trick.
The retriever went straight, without a fault, to the pit-shaft, and May was discovered alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face and a sprain in the wrist. Her suicidal plunge had been arrested, at only a few feet from the top of the shaft, by a cross-stay of timber, upon which she lay prone. There was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was not.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking