Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 16, 2025
The poor thing went haltingly enough now, and every few minutes stopped and looked around piteously into his master's face. "And the man doth look as distressed as the beast," thought Benoit, as he drew near; "it is a good man that so loves an animal." And Benoit warmed toward Willan as he saw his anxious face. If Benoit had only known! No wonder Willan's face was sorrow-stricken!
Jeanne stood by with a defiant air, superintending the cording of the last one. She anticipated some remonstrance or inquiry from Willan, and was half disappointed when he passed by, giving no sign of having observed the boxes at all, and simply lifting his hat to her with his usual formality.
Riding from county to county on his little white pony by his father's side, sitting up late at roystering feasts till he nodded in his chair, seeing all that rough men saw, and hearing all that rough men said, the child was in a fair way to be ruined outright; and so Willan Blaycke at last came to see, and one day, in a fit of unwonted conscientiousness and wisdom, he packed the poor sobbing little fellow off to England in charge of a trusty escort, and sternly made up his mind that the lad should not return till he was a man grown.
At last, half in earnest and half in fun, she struck boldly into a measure on which she would hardly have ventured could she have seen the serious and tender expression on the face of her listener under the pear-tree. As Willan caught line after line of the rollicking measure, his countenance changed. "An elfish mood is upon her," he thought.
No fine instinct had restrained her from laying, hands on everything to which she could be said to have a shadow of claim, indeed, on many things to which she had not, and even Willan himself, who had been prepared for her probable greed, was surprised when on returning to the house late one evening he found the piazza piled high from one end to the other with her boxes.
Victorine had talked with Willan perhaps five minutes. In that space of time she had persuaded him of four things, all false, that she was an innocent, guileless girl; that she had been seized with a sudden and reverential admiration for him; that she had no greater desire in life than to be back again in the safe shelter of the convent; and that her aunt Jeanne had never said an ill-word of him.
That all was very little, however, for each step was torture to the beast; his fore feet were nearly bleeding. This was what Willan had done: the day before he had taken off two of the horse's shoes, and then galloped fast over miles of rough and stony road.
Others said that he was sober enough when he did it, only that he was like one out of his mind, he sorrowed so for the loss of his only son, Willan, whom he had in the beginning of that year sent back to England to be taught in school.
He had brought the child out with him, a little chap, with marvellously black eyes and yellow curls, who wore always the costliest of embroidered coats, which it was plain some woman's hand had embroidered for him; but whether the child's mother were dead or alive Willan Blaycke never told, and nobody dared ask. That the boy needed a mother sadly enough was only too plain.
Willan," she exclaimed, "I never once thought of taking that, though there's no doubt about its being my own, and your father'd tell you so if he was here; and the horses too. He always said the grays were mine from the day he bought them. But I'm much obliged to you, I'm sure."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking