United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was in excellent health; he smiled readily. At Rottingdean he lingered for awhile. A soft mist hung all around; sky and sea were of a delicate blurred blue-grey, the former mottled in places. The sun was not visible, but its light lay in one long gleaming line out on the level water; beyond, all was vapour-veiled.
Besides, why keep anything whatever from Olive, even for a day? At dinner he told his wife, and was glad to learn that she also thought highly of Mimi and had confidence in her. Mimi lay in bed in the nursery of the hired house on the way to Rottingdean, which, considering that it was not "home," was a fairly comfortable sort of abode. The nursery was immense, though an attic.
Directly after lunch he had taken the motor out, and had whirled along the coast road, past Rottingdean through Newhaven and Seaford, and ten miles farther until the suburbs of Eastbourne had begun. There he turned, his thoughts still running a mill-race in his head, and retracing his road had by now come back to within a mile of Brighton again.
When he was still about a mile away from Rottingdean, and the hour was dusk, and he was walking up a hill, he caught sight of a girl leaning on a gate that led by a long path to a house near the cliffs. It was Mimi. She gave a cry of recognition.
That was the worst of strained relations. You were not informed of events in advance. "Where?" he asked. "Oh!" she said, pointing. "That way. On the road to Rottingdean. Near the big girls' school. We came in on that lovely electric railway along the beach. Have you been on it, Mr Coe?" Terrible! Rottingdean was precisely the scene of his honeymoon. The hazard of fate was truly appalling.
'And we'll drive to Rottingdean this afternoon, if you feel inclined. Have this last cutlet, dear! 'No, thank you. 'Well, it seems a pity to waste it. Here goes! By the way, Maude, I must speak very severely to you. I can't if you look at me like that. But really, joking apart, you must be more careful before the waiters. 'Why, dear? 'Well, we have carried it off splendidly so far.
They were once very plentiful on the Sussex Downs and seaside cliffs, and as a boy walking from my first school at Rottingdean to visit my people at Brighton, from Saturday to Sunday night, I have passed hundreds of traps consisting of rectangular holes cut in the turf, having horsehair nooses inside, set by the shepherds who took thousands of wheatears to the poulterers' shops in the town.
On the Downs beyond Rottingdean lay two or three bird-catchers, prone as they watched the semicircle of call-birds in cages, and held their hand on the string which closed the nets. The young man spoke a few words with one of these, curious about his craft.
Montfort could not forget their many delightful canters last season to Rottingdean, and, lo! she was at his side. He wished her down the cliff. In this fit of the spleen he went to the theatre: there were eleven people in the boxes. He listened to the 'School for Scandal. Never was slander more harmless.
But for a belated cab on the Rottingdean road he would not have been here now. "As hard and cruel as ever," he said. "Not one word to me, not one word in my defence. And all the time I am the victim of a vile conspiracy " "Conspiracy! Do you call vulgar theft a conspiracy?" "It was nothing else," David put in, eagerly. "A most extraordinary conspiracy.
Word Of The Day