It is certain, anyway, that about nine months after the return of the Aurora, Captain Acton, Sir William Lawrence, and Miss Lucy Acton, left Old Harbour Town, for the neighbourhood of London, where after an interval, the exact period of which being uncertain, is not of historic value enough to demand research, Old Harbour Town received the news, this time in print, in the Annual Register or La Belle Assemblée, or some such publication of the period, that Mr Walter Lawrence, late of His Majesty's Royal Navy,[Pg 454] only son of Rear-Admiral Sir William Lawrence, K.C.B., was on such a day united in the bonds of Holy Matrimony to Lucy, only daughter and co-heiress of Captain Acton, R.N. (retired).
lottery7, So it seemed to the boy, as from the brow of a hill he watched the dawn-haze drift toward the newly-open sun-gates of the eastern sky; for autumn always brought a feeling of sadness to Billy. He missed the twitter of the birds, the thousand and one notes of the wild things he loved and which always passed out and away from his world with the summer. The first hoar frost had come; soon the leaves would turn golden and crimson, the fern-clumps crumple and wither into sere, dead, scentless things. Then with shortening days and darkening skies those leaves and plants would sag to earth and the gaunt arms of the bare trees would lift empty nests toward snow-spitting skies.
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lottery7 "You will deny me even a daisy?" he cried, with a sudden passion in his manner which alarmed her, as he was not sober. He sprang to the side of the road, and picking a daisy returned to her, pulled off his hat, and said earnestly—indeed in a voice of emotion and sincerity that put a fine and appealing meaning into the expression of his eyes which by the power of the impulse then governing him were superior to the drink in his head: "Let me entreat you, madam, to put this little flower to your sweet lips, and return it to me. It is but a trifle I ask: you are too good and generous to refuse me.".
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