Chronicles of Dustypore

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t no temptation to go any further. But the notion of him in any other capacity but that of a remote member of society, whose function it was to say and do absurd things in an amusing way, was strange and altogether distasteful. Anything like intimacy was not to be thought of for an instant; the merest approach to close contact would bring out some discord, the jar of which, by a sort of instinctive anticipation, Felicia seemed to feel already. So long as he moved in quite another plane and belonged to a different world, his eccentricities might be smiled at for their comicality without the application of any rigid canon of taste or morals. But a person who was at once irreligious and over-dressed, who consta

, and no doubt justified her to herself in pushing forward Sutton's interests with more eagerness than she might otherwise have thought it right to employ about another person's concerns. When one feels a thing to be the thing that ought to happen, and sees it in danger of being frustrated by

visits to go on with their accustomed frequency; and since Maud must forthwith learn to ride and Sutton volunteered to come in the mornings to teach her, no one could blame Felicia if, in the intervals of instruction, the pupil and tea

by clumps of palms or villages nestling each in a little grove under the wing of some ancestral peepul-tree, the moon still shining overhead and the sun just above the horizon, still shrouded in the mists of morning-how fresh, how picturesque, how exhilarating everything looked! How pleasant, too, to go through all these pretty scenes with a companion who seemed somehow to know her tastes and wishes, and to have no thought but how to please her! Sutton, though in publi

s beyond. See what a beautiful blue background the sky makes to the red dome and that nice old bit of crumbling wall. The bright Indian atmos

and those delicious shady mulberries and the great stretch of

on men had fought and fallen all along the path where now they stood, and that a battery of artillery had been posted at the very corner of the village to which her guide had brought her. 'I re

d, who was possessed by a spirit of insatiable curiosi

et-stock which very nearly ended my soldiering then and there. Look now how quickly the scene changes as the sun gets up

to be hooked on to its proper site and date, felt a delicious thrill in actually realising with her own eyes the place where one of the troubles

to dislodge than the people from the Tomb. But I was unlucky when I was a

the others, had been left for some seconds to hold their own as best they could against the angry, frightened mob within. No one, perhaps scarcely Sutton himself, knew exactly what had happened. The rest of the party, however, when they made their way in, found him standing at bay over a dead comrade's body, and his antagonists too completely

ful of her power to do so. He was good, noble, chivalrous, everything that Felicia had said, and how hopelessly above herself! What must he think of one who was, as Miss Goodenough had often told her, a mere congeries of defects? True, he never seemed shocked or annoyed at anything she said, and professed to like the rides as much as she did; but might not this be fr