Chunjie

Chunjie In and out we wound our way, attracting as little attention as As he crashed again through the close-grown brush he almost forgot the ugly scene just enacted below. He had been sorry to leave Bouncer to come with the girls; now he was glad. It was good to be quite alone up there with Nature in her less familiar places. A dark ravine lured him. Well as he knew the mountain he had never explored this gorge. The delicate fragrance of wild azaleas greeted him; he could see their pale pink bloom tipping the tall trees that rose out of the chaparral forty or fifty feet above the stream that tinkled beneath them.,Then it was that Croaker, gripping the glasses in one black claw, burst into a cry of joyful recognition.,"I saw you in the looking glass!" she cried gleefully. "You needn't think you can surprise us, young lady!","But," insisted Elinor, "we haven't anything——",At the door she turned, with expansive kindliness.，"Why?" says Mona. "I couldn't well call her any thing else until I know her."，"Certainly I shall not. It would be very mean, and I wonder at you to ask the question," says Mona, with a great show of virtuous indignation. "Besides," mischievously, "if you know, there is no necessity to tell you anything."，"I think we'll have to begin with the feeding," said Bruce, as Miss Jinny and Mrs. Shelly, gorgeous in their very best raiment, entered from their bedroom. "Madam, may I have the privilege of escorting you to the head of the table?"It was a fine summer evening. The whole Wopp family was getting ready to go to a dance, to be held at a ranch some ten miles off. An array of clean clothing was laid out on the different beds and an odor of musk-scented soap pervaded the air.

Moses came bearing an achievement of spicy, opaque amber supported and surrounded by tantalizing, toast-brown crust. Before the expectant Mr. Wopp, however, had time to note these details, there was a quick rush of a small black and white object, a crash, some ear-splitting howls, as Moses, pie, Jethro, and one of Mrs. Wopp’s best blue dinner plates were precipitated against Mr. Wopp’s legs. Down his Sunday trousers meandered a yellow glacier which Mrs. Wopp regarded with dismay.,They were sailing in bright latitudes where the weather is warm, where often the sea rolls in a languid silken swell like the gentle heavings of a carpet of the sheen of satin under-blown, where the stars shine with brilliance and the moon at her full has an almost sun-like power. And very fortunately the two ships were favoured with fine and sparkling days vital with favourable winds. Throughout the daylight hours the two ships held each other steadily in view, the schooner under slightly reduced canvas, and the frigate under a press, and at night each signalled her place by rockets discharged at intervals, so that always when day broke the brace of pursuing structures were found to be either abreast, or almost so, each sunk from the sight of the other to the line of her bulwarks.,“You’d have done the same thing for me,” returned Bob, anxious to get off the subject. “Let’s talk about the dam site.”,Geoffrey, too, raises his head and smiles, in sympathy with his wife's burst of merriment, as does Miss Darling, who stops her conversation with Sir Nicholas to listen to it.,And Death and Vengeance close the ghastly band!,"Is—is Violet Mansergh a pretty girl?" asks Mona, grasping instinctively at the fact that any one called Violet Mansergh may be a possible rival.,"Well, be that as it may, they are the blessed members of the women tribe," she answered, looking at me sharply. "Now I have often told Mr. Johnson——" but here we were interrupted in what might have been the rehearsal of a glorious scrap by the appearance of Aunt Bettie Pollard, and with her came a long, tall, lovely vision of a woman in the most wonderful close clingy dress and hat that you wanted to eat the minute you saw it. I hated her instantly with the most intense adoration that made me want to lie down at her feet, and also made me feel as though I had gained all the more than twenty pounds that I have slaved off me and doubled them on again. I would have liked to lead her that minute into Dr. John's office and just to have looked at him and said one word—"Scarlet-runner!" Aunt Betty introduced her as Miss Clinton from London.,"That ain't my fault!" bawled the man at the receding figure.,Maurice shook his head. "None of our gang 'ud take it," he said. "Likely some of them Sand-sharks.","But," said Captain Acton, who was perhaps helped to a display of comparative composure of mind by the Admiral's reception of the news, "though if possible we shall sail to-morrow evening or the following day in pursuit, my opinion is, sir, that even if Mr Lawrence were left to his own shifts he would never be able to compass his undertaking. First of all, he has a highly respectable man, who has proved a good servant to me, to deal with in his mate. Will Mr Eagle permit him to carry the Minorca to Rio? Will the crew have nothing to say? What will be thought by all hands when it gets about that my daughter is on board, a prisoner in confinement in the cabin? And is my daughter so enamoured of Mr Lawrence that because he has placed her in a highly equivocal[Pg 222] situation she will be willing to marry him, or to have anything to say to him on their arrival at Rio?","A cloud?" says Mona. And I think in her inmost heart she is rather glad than otherwise that her lover's people are not on the top rung of the ladder.,"Yes; like a street arab. He was one, once, you know, major, and has not forgotten his early habits. Well, he was driven with the carriage to Deanminster.".