Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 16, 2025
No: the task-mistress took us into the cell, where she was working in company with two other women; she has earned by her constant good conduct the privilege of working in company. One of the Miss Wilbrahams, when all the other visitors except myself had left the cell, turned back and said, "I think I saw you once when I was with Miss Hesketh at her school."
Prockter and James could remember the time when the twin-horsed equipage of the Wilbrahams used to dash about the Five Towns like the chariot of the sun. The recollection made Mrs. Prockter sad, but in James it produced no such feeling. To Mrs. Prockter, Wilbraham Hall was the last of the stylish port-wine estates that in old days dotted the heights around the Five Towns.
She laid her ringless hands, lightly clasped, on a small, heavy, round mahogany table which stood in the middle of the little drawing-room, and she looked over James's shoulder into the vistas of the great drawing-room. The sombre, fading magnificence of the Wilbrahams a magnificence of dark woods, tasselled curtains, reps, and gilt was her theatre, and the theatre suited her mood.
It would have been over hours ago if Dudley and I hadn't been out shooting this afternoon. We've only just come in." But I was not thinking about supper. The Wilbrahams had been out, and Paulette Brown, left alone, had taken her chance to speak to some one.
This young-old fool had nothing but the name of Wilbraham to his back. The wealth of the Wilbrahams, or what remained of it after eight decades of declension, had, during the course of a famous twenty years' law-suit between the father of the said young-old fool and a farming cousin in California, slowly settled like golden dust in the offices of lawyers in Carey-street, London. And both Mrs.
But then the Wilbrahams had been magnates in the Bursley region for generations, up till the final Wilbraham smash in the late seventies. The town hungered to see those huge moustaches and that peculiar eye.
Prockter had a mien, and a flowered silk, before which even an apron of the Wilbrahams must quail. "I may tell you, Mr. Ollerenshaw," she remarked, confidentially, when they were alone, "that I have not the slightest intention of buying this place. Emanuel takes advantage of my good nature. You've no idea how persistent he is. So all you have to do is to advise me firmly not to buy it.
"Them?" exclaimed Mrs Machin. "What else has he bought?" "I expect he's bought all the five this and the four below, as far as Downes's. I expect you'll find that the other four have had notices just like these. You know all this row used to belong to the Wilbrahams. You surely must remember that, mother?" "Is he one of the Wilbrahams of Hillport, then?" "Yes, of course he is."
He was more than all the Charles Wilbrahams of the world together; infinitely more brilliant, more valuable, more alive; but never did he succeed, for life was not on his side. He would go under, deeper and deeper under, and so would she. The underworld, that vague and fearful place, would receive them. His generous and trusting love for her had joined with his love of a joke to sink him.
Decidedly it was worthy of the mighty reputations of the extinct Wilbrahams. The Wilbrahams had gradually risen in North Staffordshire for two centuries. About the Sunday of the Battle of Waterloo they were at their apogee. Then for a century they had gradually fallen. And at last they had extinguished themselves in the person of a young-old fool who was in prison for having cheated a pawnbroker.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking