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If he is a thin man, his dress waistcoat bulges away from his breastbone so the passerby can easily discover what brand of suspenders he fancies; but if he be stoutish, the waistcoat has a little way of hitching along up his mid-riff inch by inch until finally it has accordion-pleated itself in overlapping folds thwartwise of his tummy, coyly exposing an inch or so of clandestine shirt-front.
So we sheered off together, arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging, thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me. A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking stile?
An example of this kind of unanimity was alleged by him in the five intermediate stars of the Plough; and that the agreement in thwartwise motion is no casual one is practically demonstrated by the concordant radial velocities determined at Potsdam for four out of the five objects in question.
"See," said my friend, bearing somewhat on my shoulder, "how this strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning? Barren acres, all! But only stoop catch the light thwartwise and all is a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange thing underrun and link together the whole world.
Then through the torches clustered about the steps of the castle came the tall, erect figure of the Earl's mother, the Countess of Douglas. She stood with her head erect, looking down upon the MacKims and upon the dropped heads and heaving shoulders of their horses. Above and around the torches flared, and their reek blew thwartwise across the strange scene.
She passed, with her two gentlemen, but the French sentinel barred the way, holding his fauchard thwartwise. "On what business come you, and by what right?" he cried, in a rude voice. "By the Dauphin's gracious command, to see the Dauphin," said one of the gentlemen right courteously. "Here is his own letter, and you may know the seal, bidding La Pucelle to come before him at this hour."
But Margaret, grateful for that which the Lady Sybilla had done for them at Machecoul, spurred her steed and rode thwartwise to intercept her. "Sybilla," she said, "you will come with us to Scotland. I have many castles there, and, they tell me, a princessdom of mine own. We shall all be happy together and forget these ill times. Maud and I can never repay that which you have done for us."
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