R patti

R patti CHAPTER 114. The Gilder. Patricia clapped her hands.,She sighed; the distress of her heart saddened her face with a meaning as of tears.,Her eyes fall upon the hearthrug. Half under the fender a small piece of crumpled paper attracts her notice. Still talking, she stoops mechanically and picks it up, smooths it, and opens it.,But this, it may be, was all village slander, and was never borne out by anything. And Elspeth had married the gardener's son, and Sir Launcelot had married an earl's daughter; and when the first baby was born at the "big house," Elspeth came to the Towers and nursed him as she would have nursed her own little bairn, but that Death, "dear, beauteous Death, the jewel of the just, shining nowhere but in the dark," sought and claimed her own little one two days after its birth.,Everything was going smoothly when suddenly a catastrophe stopped short the circus, and left Moses greatly distressed. He inwardly complained that never yet was he “havin’ a good time but some orful thing happened to put a cloud over the sun.” The hens and chickens that had been pressed into the ranks of the circus performers were crowding round a swill-bucket which Moses had left tilted at a precarious angle on an upturned soap-box. In its zig-zag gyrations round the yard, the ostrich, to avoid the ubiquitous fowl, ran against the bucket and the odoriferous contents were splashed over the yellow-draped circus lady. The contents of the swill-pail trickled down Betty’s finery and dropped sadly from the pink headgear of the ostrich.，"It means, o' course, that we'll get no more fish," spoke up the practical Scraff.，"Won't need Billy any more!" I exclaimed with a rage that made my voice literally scorch past my lips. "Was there ever a minute in his life that I haven't needed Billy? How dare you say such a thing to me? You are cruel, cruel, and I have always known it, cold and cruel like all other men who don't care how they wring the life-blood out of women's hearts, and are willing to use their children to do it with. Even the law doesn't help us poor helpless creatures, and you can take our children and go with them to the ends of the earth and leave us suffering. I have gone on and believed that you were not like what the women say all men are, and that you cared whether you hurt people or not, but now I see that you are just the same, and you'll take my baby away if you want to—and I can do nothing to prevent it—nothing in the wide world—I am completely and absolutely helpless—you coward, you!"，Patricia laughed as she too rose.It is at this very moment the library door is suddenly flung open, and Jenkins appears upon the threshold, with his face as white as nature will permit, and his usually perfect manner much disturbed. "Sir Nicholas, can I speak to you for a moment?" he says, with much excitement, growing positively apoplectic in his endeavor to be calm.

Elinor, who had lifted her eyes perfunctorily, gave real attention.,The man, seeing Mona, breaks from the woman, and comes up to her.,"An overwhelming desire to see you again," returns this wise young man, in a tone that is absolutely abject.,Betty who secretly preferred to trip the light fantastic toe in this manner, maintained a discreet silence.,"That's so," admitted Patricia readily. "You always hit the nail on the head, old lady. Now I must run. See you later," and closing the door behind her, she ran down the steps and hurried off through the tingling morning air, with her parcel tight under her arm and a kindling light on her mobile face.,"Well don't go to Dublin, at all events," says her mother, plaintively. "It's wretched form.",And Billy did not think of it as strange till Buzz’s grandmother called from behind the window curtain, “Delia, you surely won’t traipse through town with that crowd! How you will look!”,He had left Mona in the morning at the Grosvenor, and had run down to have it out with his mother and get her permission to bring Mona to the Towers to be introduced to her and his brothers. This he preferred to any formal calling on their parts.,"Well, you can't hinder me from stayin', an' I figger I'm in fer a third," said Anson, seating himself doggedly near the stove.,Several hands waved wildly and a chorus of voices eagerly broke in; through the childish babel could be heard a lisping narrative.,Supper passed. Edith went to church, Billy to keep an appointment with his teacher; and the spring twilight settled down over the room. Mrs. Bennett knew this would be a trying hour, and hastened her work, inventing some light task for May Nell; hastened also the errand to her own room. Yet though she was gone but a moment, on returning a sob greeted her from the cuddled heap on the couch.,The place she has chosen as her mirror is a still pool fringed with drooping grasses and trailing ferns that make yet more dark the sanded floor of the stream..