Double Harness
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Оглавление
Hope Anthony. Double Harness
CHAPTER I. SOME VIEWS OF THE INSTITUTION
CHAPTER II. THE FAIRY RIDE
CHAPTER III. THE WORLDLY MIND
CHAPTER IV. INITIATION
CHAPTER V. THE BIRTH OF STRIFE
CHAPTER VI. NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD
CHAPTER VII. A VINDICATION OF CONSCIENCE
CHAPTER VIII. IDEALS AND ASPIRATIONS
CHAPTER IX. A SUCCESSFUL MISSION
CHAPTER X. THE FLINTY WALL
CHAPTER XI. THE OLIVE BRANCH
CHAPTER XII. IMAGES AND THEIR WORK
CHAPTER XIII. THE DEAD AND ITS DEAD
CHAPTER XIV. FOR HIS LOVE AND HIS QUARREL
CHAPTER XV. IN THE TEETH OF THE STORM
CHAPTER XVI. THE UPPER AND THE NETHER STONE
CHAPTER XVII. WANDERING WITS
CHAPTER XVIII. THE RISING GENERATION
CHAPTER XIX. IN THE CORNER
CHAPTER XX. THE HOUR OF WRATH
CHAPTER XXI. AN UNCOMPROMISING EXPRESSION
CHAPTER XXII. ASPIRATIONS AND COMMON SENSE
CHAPTER XXIII. A THING OF FEAR
CHAPTER XXIV. FRIENDS
CHAPTER XXV. PICKING UP THE PIECES
CHAPTER XXVI. THE GREAT WRONG
CHAPTER XXVII. SAMPLES OF THE BULK
CHAPTER XXVIII. TO LIFE AND LIGHT AGAIN
CHAPTER XXIX. WITH OPEN EYES
Отрывок из книги
Courtland went off early next morning in the dog-cart to Fairhaven station – no railway line ran nearer Milldean – and Grantley Imason spent the morning lounging about his house, planning what improvements could be made and what embellishments provided against the coming of Sibylla. He enjoyed this pottering both for its own sake and because it was connected with the thought of the girl he loved. For he was in love – as much in love, it seemed to him, as a man could well be. "And I ought to know," he said, with a smile of reminiscence, his mind going back to earlier affairs of the heart, more or less serious, which had been by no means lacking in his career. He surveyed them without remorse, though one or two might reasonably have evoked that emotion, and with no more regret than lay in confessing that he had shared the follies common to his age and his position. But he found great satisfaction in the thought that Sibylla had had nothing to do with any of the persons concerned. She had known none of them; she was in no sense of the same set with any one of the five or six women of whom he was thinking; her surroundings had always been quite different from theirs. She came into his life something entirely fresh, new, and unconnected with the past. Herein lay a great deal of the charm of this latest, this final affair. For it was to be final – for his love's sake, for his honour's sake, and also because it seemed time for such finality in that ordered view of life and its stages to which his intellect inclined him. There was something singularly fortunate in the chance which enabled him to suit his desire to this conception, to find the two things in perfect harmony, to act on rational lines with such a full and even eager assent of his feelings.
He reminded himself, with his favourite shrug, that to talk of chance was to fall into an old fallacy; but the sense of accident remained. The thing had been so entirely unplanned. He had meant to buy a place in the North; it was only when the one he wanted had been snapped up by somebody else that the agents succeeded in persuading him to come and look at the house at Milldean. It happened to take his fancy, and he bought it. Then he happened to be out of sorts, and stayed down there an unbroken month, instead of coming only from Saturday to Monday. Again, Sibylla and Jeremy had meant to go away when the rector died, and had stayed on only because Old Mill House happened to fall vacant so opportunely. No other house was available in the village. So the chances went on, till chance culminated in that meeting of his with Sibylla: not their first encounter, but the one he always called his meeting with her in his own thoughts – that wonderful evening when all the sky was red, and the earth too looked almost red, and the air was so still. Then he had been with her in his garden, and she, forgetful of him, had turned her eyes to the heavens, and gazed and gazed. Presently, and still, as it seemed, unconsciously, she had stretched out her hand and caught his in a tight grip, silently but urgently demanding his sympathy for thoughts and feelings she could not express. At that moment her beauty seemed to be born for him, and he had determined to make it his. He smiled now, saying that he had been as impulsive as the merest boy, thanking fortune that he could rejoice in the impulse instead of condemning it – an end which a priori would have seemed much the more probable. In nine cases out of ten it would have been foolish and disastrous to be carried away in an instant like that. In his case it had, at any rate, not proved disastrous. From that moment he had never turned back from his purpose, and he had nothing but satisfaction in its now imminent accomplishment.
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"And when we're old folks? Isn't it only the young who can ride like that?"
She stood silent for a moment or two. Then she turned her eyes up to his in silence still, with the colour shining bright on her cheeks. She took his hand and kissed it. He knew the thought that his words had called into her mind. He had made the girl think that, when they were old, the world would not be; there would be young hearts still to ride, young hearts in whom their hearts should be carried still in the glorious gallop, young hearts which had drawn life from them.
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