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Updated: June 9, 2025
Royall's shoulder, as he leaned against the counter, a girl with her hair puffed high smirked and nodded at a dapper drummer who was getting his key at the desk across the hall. Charity stood among these cross-currents of life as motionless and inert as if she had been one of the tables screwed to the marble floor.
Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh and violent, and still weaker. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down," and to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that Mr.
Royall's tongue at last became so unendurable that she was formally indicted by the Grand Jury as a common scold, and was tried in the Circuit Court before Judge Cranch. His Honor charged the jury at length, reviewing the testimony and showing that, if found guilty, she must be ducked, in accordance with the English law in force in the District of Columbia.
Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her, though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton, where he had begun his legal career. After Mrs. Royall's death there was some talk of sending her to a boarding-school. Miss Hatchard suggested it, and had a long conference with Mr.
Royall's black leather Bible, steadying it in front with a white stone on which a view of the Brooklyn Bridge was painted; and she sat before her reflection, bending the brim this way and that, while Ally Hawes's pale face looked over her shoulder like the ghost of wasted opportunities. "I look awful, don't I?" she said at last with a happy sigh. Ally smiled and took back the hat.
They gave all they had, but their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments.... The heat had grown suffocating she felt it descend on her in smothering waves, and the faces in the crowded hall began to dance like the pictures flashed on the screen at Nettleton. For an instant Mr. Royall's countenance detached itself from the general blur.
But where had he taken his evening meal, and what had caused him to stay away from Mr. Royall's? The light was positive proof of his presence, for Miss Hatchard's servants were away on a holiday, and her farmer's wife came only in the mornings, to make the young man's bed and prepare his coffee. Beside that lamp he was doubtless sitting at this moment.
At one of the windows she bought a sheet of letter-paper, an envelope and a stamp; then she sat down at a table and dipped the rusty post office pen in ink. She had come there possessed with a fear which had haunted her ever since she had felt Mr. Royall's ring on her finger: the fear that Harney might, after all, free himself and come back to her.
She remembered how, in the darkness of her room, she had covered her face to press his imagined kiss closer; and her heart raged against him for the liberty he had not taken. "Well, I'll go," she said suddenly. "I'll go right off." "Go where?" She heard the startled note in Mr. Royall's voice. "Why, out of their old library: straight out, and never set foot in it again.
She saw that the decision, from whatever cause it was taken, had disturbed him deeply; and she immediately concluded that his change of plan was due to some surreptitious interference of Mr. Royall's. All her old resentments and rebellions flamed up, confusedly mingled with the yearning roused by Harney's nearness.
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