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When in the Chops of the Channel the weather thickened all round: a dingy drizzle of rain curtained the horizon into the distance of a cannon shot, and out of this sullen dimness which was not to be shifted nor broken into spaces showing recesses, the surge came in a steel-dark curve upon whose polished back the foam that fell from the head of the billow cast a deeper gloom filled with raven gleams like water at night. A bright look-out was kept. The Aurora under all plain sail sprang through these glooming waters, and the brine swept from her weather-bow in sharp shootings of brilliant hail. The house, or at least the front of it, was built after a design by Inigo Jones. The pediment was perforated by a circular window glazed with a casement whose frame resembled the spokes of a ship's wheel. A variety of antique symbolism resembling the hideous sculptures which sometimes close the chapters in books of the seventeenth century, under-ran the eaves. The tall, narrow windows gleamed blackly amidst the skeletons of the winter, or the coloured embroidery of the[Pg 3] summer creepers. The hall door was noble and hospitable in expanse. A carriage drive swept from it on either hand the oval lawn to a handsome gate whose supports were crowned by the arms of the Actons on the one hand and the arms of a family into which one of the Actons had married on the other hand. "Well, it's beyond me," confessed Hinter. "I've heard that you could handle dogs, young fellow, but I didn't think there was anybody in the world besides myself who could bring a whimper of gladness from that pair. Now then, Dexter! Sphinx! away home with you." Obediently the big dogs wheeled back into the thicket..
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"Why, sir, of course I accept without hesitation, and feel most deeply obliged."I tried logging in using my phone number and I
was supposed to get a verification code text,but didn't
get it. I clicked resend a couple time, tried the "call
me instead" option twice but didn't get a call
either. the trouble shooting had no info on if the call
me instead fails.There was
Captain Acton paused for a few moments at the foot of the companion ladder with a grave smile on his face.
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Conrad
Paul started, and answered: "She took me to the locker that's under the window, and, lifting the lid, pointed down into the inside, and began to laugh with a strange, crying noise, like a cat quarrelling, and then says she, 'Do you see it?' There was nothing in the locker, saving that in one end of it she'd made a sort of bird's nest out of the bed feathers which I 'adn't swept away, and in it was her rings, a piece of soap, a salt-cellar which I hadn't missed from the tray, and what I took for a ball, but which, I allow, was her gloves rolled up tight. 'Do you see it?' she said, looking so cunning and a-whispering so mysterious, it was more like dreaming than living to see and watch her. 'That's my secret!' and then she slams the lid of the locker to, with a noise which I thought your[Pg 314] honour would believe was a pistol-shot, and says, frownin' and starin' at me with eyes that seemed to be in a blaze, 'If you says a word about what you've seen I'll kill you.'" "I think I told you, Sir William," said Captain Acton, after a short interval passed in reflection, "that the Minorca is in want of a captain." "It is most happily explained in the play of the Man of the World," said Miss Acton. "I was never more pleased than by Sir Pertinax Macsycophant's reply to his nephew's question how he had made his way in the world. Sir Pertinax replies, 'By booing, sir.' A great deal of money and fine social positions have been obtained by booing." "No, me an' Pa an' Anse was down at the back end of the place. Ma saw him, though, an' she told me all about it. Say, maybe I wasn't mad, but I got even, all right.".
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