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Updated: September 28, 2025
It carried him back a dozen years to a dirty little peasant's cabin on the hillside outside Durazzo, to the livid face of a young Albanian chief, who had lost at Kara's whim all that life held for a man, to the hateful eyes of the girl's father, who stood with folded arms glaring down at the bound and manacled figure on the floor, to the smoke-stained rafters of this peasant cottage and the dancing shadows on the roof, to that terrible hour of waiting when he sat bound to a post with a candle flickering and spluttering lower and lower to the little heap of gunpowder that would start the trail toward the clumsy infernal machine under his chair.
Once upon a time, before the Germans came, Dives had a lovely château, part of it very old, with a round turret under a tall pointed hat; the other part comparatively young as young as the Renaissance and all built of that pale, rose-pink colour which most châteaux of this forestland, and this Île-de-France used to wear in happy days before they put on smoke-stained mourning.
The Thames, alive with barges and steamers, the smoke-stained buildings, the processions of clerks, the crossing and sweepers, the smart policemen, the cab-drivers, the draymen, he knew from Leech's drawings, and he was on his way, marvellous to relate, to the oldest work of man in the city, in which the water flowed as it had been flowing ever since London was Londineum.
The street-car did not land her anywhere near a market; it whirled her past the lines of low wooden houses into the big brick shops with their arched windows and terra-cotta ornaments that showed the ambitious architecture of a growing Western town, past these into mills and factories and smoke-stained chimneys. Here, she stopped.
There it will at least be safe from the vultures and the horrible fate that awaits the unburied dead of a defeated army." Then tenderly and sadly he laid the young soldier away in his peaceful grave, covering his face with his smoke-stained cap, and folding his pulseless hands upon his bosom.
The squire got interested in the thing, and eventually had the whole place dug out. We found a large enclosure, once surrounded by a stone wall, of which you see the remains; in two of the corners there was an enormous deposit of wood ashes, in deep pits, which looked as if great fires had burnt there; and the walls in those two corners were all calcined and smoke-stained.
The roar of voices indeed was still in his ears as he stood before the window of his compartment, looking out over the fire-hung city with its vaporous flames, its huge furnaces, its glare which was already becoming fainter. A myriad lights still twinkled upon the hillsides; the smoke-stained sky was red with the reflection of those thousand torches.
"Air!" she repeated, with scornful independence. "Air!", and turning away in disgust, she limped painfully back to wait outside of the closed door. Here, when she had seated herself in a sagging chair, she lifted her bleak eyes to the smoke-stained ceiling, and repeated for the third time in a tone of profound contempt: "Air!" At the foot of the stairs, Corinna ran against Gideon Vetch.
He's liable to be along any time, now." He glanced at her scorched, smoke-stained dress. "He'll sure think you made a hand, all right!" Val took the hint, and blushed with true feminine shame that she was not looking her best. "I'll go and change," she murmured, and rose wearily.
The firmness with which the men mouthed their cigars made the lower part of their faces expressionless, heavy, unappealing. They were like politicians cynically dividing appointments. How could they understand her world? Did that faint and delicate world exist? Was she a fool? She doubted her world, doubted herself, and was sick in the acid, smoke-stained air.
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