United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


He guessed that in this sudden withdrawal to the isolation of the firs, Conscience had followed the same instinct that takes a wounded animal off, to be alone with its pain. So he approached with a noiseless caution abetted by the sound-deadening carpet of pine needles, searching the shadows for her unannounced and at first vainly.

The sound of the murmuring voices passed suddenly from confused dullness to a sharp clearer-edged speech, telling Ainsley, as plainly as if he could see, that the speaker had risen from behind the sound-deadening ridge of earth and was looking clear over its top, Ainsley lay as still as one of the clods of earth about him, lay scarcely daring to breathe, and with his skin pringling.

There was dead silence within and without: the huge Government offices were luxuriously provided with sound-deadening apparatus, and not even the rolling of the vast motors within a hundred yards was able to send a vibration through the layers of rubber on which the walls rested. There was only one noise that could penetrate, and that the sound of thunder.

The nurses were in many cases volunteers who had seen service in Mudros, and these had just got the Royal Red Cross Medal, equivalent to a D.S.O. Very pleased they were with it, and greatly they deserved it. Their quarters were divided by thin mud walls into narrow compartments, and they found the lack of sound-deadening properties trying.

Miss Lambart stopped short and tried to hear from which of them came the sound of the footfalls of the retiring princess. It came from none of the three; the floor of the eaves was covered with sound-deadening sand. Miss Lambart walked back to the entrance of the cave. "She has escaped," she said in a tone of resignation.

But now some primitive instinct perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him meticulously noiseless. He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the drinking-place.