United States or Sweden ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Hale would come too adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was. "Martha!" now came her husband's impatient voice. "Don't keep folks waiting out here in the cold." She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.
"What can Jud be thinking of?" he muttered somewhat testily, stepping along to slip the bolt in its place, but the next instant his eyes fell upon two dark bundles huddled at the horse's feet, and with a startled exclamation he bent over to examine his find, just as Faith burst in through the door behind him, crying, "They must have left the house, grandpa, because the back hall door is unlocked and the storm-door is swinging."
Then he passed on and stood beside the tightly closed storm-door. The signs and sounds he heard were apparently sufficient. For, after a while, he turned back and set out to return to his quarters. For many minutes he groped his way through the blinding snow, his mind completely given up to the things his secret watch had revealed.
Wednesday the Twenty-fifth There was indeed something wrong. I knew that the moment I heard Dinky-Dunk come into the house. I knew it by the way he let the storm-door swing shut, by the way he crossed the hall as far as the living-room door and then turned back, by the way he slowly mounted the stairs and passed leaden-footed on to his study.
And the moment they reached the rear storm-door, and their fur-hooded, fur-mantled charges were safely within, Schuchardt excused himself, Miriam Arnold's eyes following with a mute message that he felt, if he did not hear. But Larrabee lingered. Stamping and shaking off the snow, he followed into the warm and cozy army quarters.
Even the hall lamp was extinguished at Devers's quarters, though there were lights aloft. Devers had a storm-door, another instance of his individuality, as even the colonel's quarters were not so embellished. It was a perfectly still night, not a whiff of wind astir, and yet Davies could have sworn the storm-door swung slowly open a foot or so as they neared the gate, then suddenly shut to.
The family sang as before the old German hymn: "Now the woods are all sleeping, Guard us we pray." "Let us pray now," said the collier. They knelt; the merchant by his portmanteau as before. He watched the storm-door. It did not open. But he became conscious of light overhead. He looked up. A star was forming there. Then a face of light on whose forehead gleamed the star.
And at once my ears were filled with yells and coarse laughter in men's and women's voices. There was no storm-door, and the interior of the château at least, the wing in which I found myself was almost as cold as the outside. I stood still, hesitating which way to take. A fiddle was being played somewhere, and the bursts of noisy laughter sounded at intervals.
What was more, he felt that his companion had seen and noted the same circumstance, for she drew an instant closer to his side, then as quickly seemed to recollect herself and edged away. Davies looked back over his shoulder. So certain was he that the storm-door had been opened and closed by some unseen hand within the wooden casing that he would have turned to investigate, but for his companion.
"And you must not give way to anger; if you do, anger is fire, and he will grow!" said the collier. The collier led the merchant up the stairs to his room and left him there, saying, "Remember." The moon shone into the room. The Swiss cuckoo clock struck ten eleven twelve. The merchant could not sleep. He was haunted by the fiery eyes that he had seen at the storm-door.
Word Of The Day