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.
rummyculture, Captain Acton was silent. He was astonished. He had never observed his daughter as Aunt Caroline did. He was wanting in feminine sagacity where the heart is concerned. He[Pg 385] saw that if his daughter was not in love with Mr Lawrence, she was dangerously near that passion; she seemed to him to have been transformed into a sweetheart by usage which would have made the heart of most young women fierce with hate and horror. She was under a spell which she thought to break by the practice of an inherited art, as miraculous in effect as it had been unsuspected in being, and she had left her kidnapper seemingly as enamoured of him as though his behaviour from the beginning had been strictly honourable and chivalrous, an additament to the passion which his gallant record, his lofty bearing, and his handsome looks had inspired in her.
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rummyculture "Her master should be able to dispense physic with the aid of a book," said Captain Acton. "Besides, the idea is to isolate the sufferers from the rest of the crew in the black, wet, slush-lighted holes in which Merchant sailors are forced to live in dozens, breathing the aroma of their own breath, and creating such an atmosphere that the wicked halo of miasma gleams a corpse-light round the flickering, stinking flame which hovers at the mouth of the spout of the lamp.".
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