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When Mr Lawrence had read this letter through, he was in the act of crushing it by one of those spasmodic motions of the hand which accompany a sudden violent gust of wrath, he met the eyes of the female in the bar fixed upon him; in her gloomy beer-flavoured recess, faintly luminous with hanging rows of highly-polished drinking pots, and a sideboard well within laden with metal vessels for drinking from and for holding drink, the landlady of "The Swan," for such was this decoration of the bar, had manifestly been studying his face whilst he read. She knew him very well, and she was also well acquainted with his habits. In a breath on meeting her eyes he changed his resolution, and folded up the letter into its original creases, giving her a smile which did not seem in the least[Pg 124] degree forced, and saying to her in his pleasantest manner, "Is the ordinary on?" and receiving her answer after she had darted a look at an invisible clock in her room, "In another three minutes, sir," he passed on and went upstairs. It was not long before the brig that was chasing on the schooner's weather-quarter swelled and paled in distortion with the encompassing thickness, and presently she was a pallid square, and then she became a smudge, after which the rain curtain dropped upon her, and she vanished. Then it was that Captain Weaver luffed the schooner to windward of her course, and she went ahead with flattened-in sheets, leaning to it and severing the flint-coloured billow with her sharp tooth of fore-foot: and so she held on, until, had the weather cleared, the brig, even had she taken in her stun-sails and hauled the wind with yards sweated fore and aft, would have been found dead to leeward and far away beyond all dream of prize money amongst the French crew. Billy pursed up his lips in thought. "Say!" he cried, "I've got it. You go on back there where you played possum, an' wait fer Anse. When he comes he's goin' to beg a favor of you, sure as shootin'. He played a dirty trick on me not long ago an' he's been keepin' out of my way ever since. Lied to me so's to get me to thrash a feller that licked him. I'll tell you all about it later. Anse is goin' to ask you to square it with me; he's jest that kind. You promise to get him off this time if he goes away an' leaves you by yourself. Then you come back here, see?".
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Conrad
Again the poor old Admiral bowed, this time with a glow of pride, because a sentence of praise from the mighty Nelson excited in the heart of this old sailor a transport that the highest honour conferred by the King himself could not have induced. CHAPTER XX BILLY MEETS A LOVELY GHOST What could the unfortunate, infatuated, handsome rascal say? Her appeal was poignant by virtue of her deep distress, the misery of her condition, the insane disposition of her beautiful face, wild and almost white in its shadowing of hair. What could he say to her? His countenance was filled with the confusion of his mind. His heart beat tumultuously with love that raged with its sense of helplessness. These phrases do not exaggerate a state that nothing but the highest form of genius could delineate in its astounding complexity of adoration, despair, horror at the consequences of his own lightly undertaken act, honour that could be no stranger to a valiant nature, and a resolution to persevere and conquer as a consequence of the character that could lay upon its owner's soul this enormous obligation of the betrayal of the girl he worshipped and the man who had stood his friend when the world was sterile, and he must either flee the country or rot in gaol. Billy looked searchingly at his new friend. "I never told a soul how I did it, 'cept my chum, Maurice Keeler," he said. "But I'll tell you. That same evenin' I was prowlin' through the slashin' lookin' fer white grubs fer bass-bait. I found a big rotten stump, so I pushed it over, an' right down under the roots I found an old weasel an' six half-grown kittens. Afore she could get over her surprise, I had her an' her family in the tin pail I had with me, an' the cover on. By rights I should'a killed the whole caboodle of 'em, I s'pose, 'cause they're mighty hard on the birds; but I had work fer 'em to do..
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