Pyramid King

Pyramid King CHAPTER XXXVIII. A PRESIDENT FOR ONE NIGHT. There was a murmur of assent and Elinor rose quickly.,A light step sounded on the gravel; the door opened and Erie entered. She was dressed in white. The damp bay-breeze had kissed the golden hair to shimmering life but there were shadows beneath the violet eyes, a dreary pathos about the unsmiling mouth.,"Yes. I thank you for your goodness," returns he, slowly.,"Oh, no, you won't," says Rodney, absently. In truth, his mind is wandering to that last little speech of hers, and is trying to unravel it.,The blandishments of soda water fountains, candy stores, and other boyish temptations, found no victim in Billy. But if Mr. Cooper, the tinshop man, had driven hard bargains he would have bankrupted the boy. As it was his weekly allowance suffered in spite of Mr. Cooper’s generosity and Billy’s free access to a rich scrap heap at the rear of the big shop where everything, one would say, in tin and iron was made, from well pipe, tanks, and boilers, to tin wings for Edith’s fairies in the opera.，Lady Rodney regards him curiously, trying to read his downcast face. Has the foolish boy at last been brought to see a flaw in his idol of clay?，“He made me his rodman, if that’s any sign.”，"Yes, they are pretty, but insignificant," says the Æsthete, contemptuously. "Paltry children of the earth, not to be compared with the lenten or the tiger lily, or the fiercer beauty of the sunflower, or the hues of the unsurpassable thistle!"Time, with lovers, "flies with swallows' wings;" they neither feel nor heed it as it passes, so all too full of haste the moments seem. They are to them replete with love and happiness and sweet content. To-day is an accomplished joy, and to-morrow will dawn for no other purpose but to bring them together. So they think and so they believe.

Little Red Riding-Hood undressed, and went to the bedside, and was very much astonished to see how different her grandmother looked to what she did when she was up and dressed.,"Yes; I am that most despicable of all things, a third son.",“Oh, let them wait,” said Bob. “You can go next Sunday. We haven’t been out together for a long time. Come on, be a sport.”,"But what—" began Patricia again.,THE unexpected certainly happened to Johnny Blossom that day. He had just swung round on the road leading toward Kingthorpe, with no thought of going the whole way, for Uncle Isaac was ill and had gone to a sanitarium, and there wasn’t the least bit of fun to be had just in Kingthorpe itself with all its elegance. So early in the summer as this there were no ripe berries in the garden; and he must not go into the stables, for Carlstrom the coachman was a regular crosspatch.,"But why do you suspect Dido?","But why did you wish to act in this generous manner?",“No, four, exactly.”,"Oh, so she's your gal, is she?" Caleb thrust his hands deep into his pockets, striving hard to keep his face stern. "How long you and Ann been sweetheartin'?" he asked.,Whilst he walked Mr Lawrence came up from the cabin through the companion-hatch, and after standing a few moments looking about him, he stepped to the side of Mr Eagle. The contrast between the two men was remarkable. You could scarcely have believed that they belonged to the same nation. Mr Lawrence's tall, elegant, and dignified figure towered above the poor, unshapely conformation of Eagle; his handsome face wore an expression of haughtiness, distance, and reserve. Both Mr Eagle and the boatswain, named Thomas Pledge, who[Pg 237] acted as second mate, and the rest of the crew had already discovered that their captain perfectly well understood and remembered that he had been an officer in the Royal Navy, a sailor of His Majesty the King, that comparatively brief as his story was it was brilliant with heroic incident and adventure, and that instead of being greatly obliged to Captain Acton for this command, he considered that he was acting with a very uncommon degree of condescension in taking charge of a merchant vessel, unless indeed she was a prize to his man-o'-war.,That it was a crime he was certain, for there was no reasonable idea to suppose that Maurice had committed suicide. He had left for Deanminster hardly three hours before, full of health and spirits; and now he was dead. A dead body, a lonely road--all the evidence of an atrocious assassination having been committed, and not one trace of the assassin. Undoubtedly the twice-uttered cry had come from Maurice, and as Jen had raced out of the house after the first time he heard it, he must have reached his boy almost immediately after he died; before, so to speak, the body had time to grow cold. Yet the strange part of the affair was that the body was cold, and that there did not seem to be any wound whereby the murder could have been achieved.,Great mosquitoes whined about his head and stung his neck and ears. Mottled flies bit him and left a burning smart. The saw-like edges of the grass cut his hands and strove to trip him as he pushed his improvised raft forward. Once his foot slipped on the greasy bog, and the quicksands all but claimed him. But he pushed on, reaching at last the black sullen shallows, putrid and ill-smelling with decayed growth, and alive with hideous insects..