Rhoda Fleming -- Volume 5

se of day. It is day that follows, notwithstanding: The sad fair girl survived, and her flickering life was the sole light of the

drunk it between hurried readings from her mother's Bible; the one true companion to which she had often clung, always half-availingly. The Bible was found by her side, as if it ha

xty-three (if there is any need for our being precise), were due to him, and would necessarily be for evermore due to him, seeing that it is beyond all human and even spiritual agency to make good unto man the dinner he has lost, Master Gammon uttered no word to sh

ayers faithful every night!" The observation was apparently taken by Master Gammo

patient bent back, and slowly chopping old grey ja

ess, when I confess to you I did feel spiteful at you to think that you were wiltin' to eat the dumplin's while all of us mourned and rocked as in a quake, expe

ched all through by them, as she was herself, and to feel thereby, as she did, that he knew everything that was

of speech; while Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector's consciousness of prodigious things implied which were not in any d

ot divest themselves of the idea that it was a manifestation of power in Master Gammon to show forth undisturbed while they were feeling their life shaken in them to the depths. I have never had the opportunity of examining the idol-worshipping mind of a savage; but it seems possible that the immutability of aspect of his little wooden God may sometimes touch him with a similar astounded awe;-even when, and indeed especially after, he has thrashed it. Had the old man betrayed his mortality in a sign of curiosity to know why the hubbub of trouble had arisen, and who was to blame, and what was th

ong as that old man," t

es, all of him's go

eep himself safe, Robert; there's

"He's safe-safe enough. An old hulk doesn't very easily manage to f

rned the farmer; "I've had days

fer being the fiddle or the

ive as Master Gammon, the farmer beheld merely a stupefied old man, and not

Anthony had darkened his golden horizon for him, a

ss yourself neat, my lass." She knew what was meant by that remark. Messages daily had been coming down from the Hall, but the rule of a discerning lady was then established there, and Rhoda had been spared a visit from either Edward or Algernon, though she knew them to be at hand. During Dahlia's convalescence,

ill manifest: Edward came alone,

were united. It required that he should see her to know fully the sinner he had been. Wasted though she was, he was ready to make her his own, if only for the sake of making amends to this dear fair soul, whose picture of Sa

id, pointing to the two pines in the miller's ground

you unhappy to s

ee them till

He thought that warmer hop

urs are kind

ey, inquire af

he wondered that Dahlia should feel it pleasurab

h me every day, and kno

a comfort to wom

e wished. She dared not speak her wish to one whose remembered mastery in w

e might come to her

om

d the readiness

the immediate reward for his public acknowledgement of his misdeeds. He walked in this neighbourhood known by what he had done, and his desire was to take his wife away, never more to be seen there. Following so deep a darkness, he wanted at least a cheerful dawn: not one of a penitential gr

imes. There was but one answer for him; and when he ceased to charge her with unforgivingness, he came to the strange conclusion that beyond our calling of a woman a Saint for rhetorical purposes, and esteeming her as one for pictorial, it is indeed possible, as he had slightly discerned in this woma