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He bade her good-morning with profound respect. Her dog barked in his face, and she silenced it by lifting it under her arm. "A woman," said Miss Acton, "cannot but think with more or less kindness of the man who offers her marriage and who loves her. She may reject him, but she will always feel a tenderness for him." He was Mr Walter Lawrence, a son of Admiral Lawrence, and down to a recent period a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was something over thirty years of age, but drink, dissipation, the hard life of the sea and some fever which had got into his blood and proved intermittent, had worked in his face like time, and he might have passed for any age between thirty-five and forty-five. Nevertheless he was an extremely handsome man, of the classic Greek type in lineament, but improved, at least to the British eye, by the Saxon colouring of hair, skin, and eyes. His teeth were extraordinarily white and good for a sailor who had lived on gun-room fare in times when the ship's biscuit was flint, and the peas which rolled about in the discoloured hot water called soup, fit only for loading a blunderbuss with to shoot men dead. His eyes told their tale of drink, but they were large and fine and spirited; his light brown hair, according to the fashion of[Pg 39] the age, was combed down his back and lay in a rope-shaped tail there. He wore a wide-brimmed round hat, and his attire, a little the worse for wear, consisted of a blue coat, white waistcoat, sage-green kerseymere breeches, and, needless to say, the cravat was high and full. He stood about six feet, his figure was extremely well proportioned, and in addition to these merits his carriage had the easy elegance which the flow of the billow and the heave of the deck infuse into all human figures not radically vile and deformed. His voice was soft, winning, and somewhat plaintive, and no man, whether on or off the stage, not even Incledon, sang a song with more exquisite feeling and sweeter sincerity of passion..
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"Me hands are a bit unsteady," said Harry, quickly. "We'll l'ave the light be as ut is, Billy." "Aye," he would answer. "Your mother and I were happy in that way. But she was taken away and all I had in her place was heart loneliness—but for you." Then she would kiss him softly and, stealing about her household tasks, sing him to fitful sleep as she moved quietly about the room. Whilst this singular conversation was being conducted in the cabin, a scene in the tragicomedy of which this book is the relation was being prepared on deck. The convoy on the starboard bow had considerably risen and was scattering, and flags from the armed fabrics which watched the vessels streamed at gaff end and mizzen royal mast-head in signal to the slow sailers and to other ships whose blockheads of masters, indifferent to the safety of the bottoms they commanded, acted without reference to the possibility of the enemy heaving into view, and some of them with the contemptible determination to prove their independence by giving the commodore and the naval officers in the other ships as much trouble and annoyance as skilless seamanship could provide. For Billy, who knew and understood so well the sweeping wilderness of silence and mysteries, this swamp held a dread which, try as he might, he could not analyze. On one other occasion had he striven to penetrate it, but as if the bogland recognized in him a force not easily set aside, it had enwrapped him with its deadly mists which chilled and weakened, torn his flesh with its razor-edged grass and sucked at his feet with its oozy, dragging quicksands. He had turned back in time. For two weeks following his exploit he had lain ill with ague, shivering miserably, silent, but thinking..
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