His lips had indeed shut very tight, but unconscious
exaggeration made them tremble first.
And then the fellow's manner to himself, his defiant taunts, his final
challenge! Langholm was not sorry to remember the last; it relieved him
from the moral incubus of the clandestine and the underhand; it bid him
go on and do his worst; it set his eyes upon the issue as between
himself and Steel, and it shut them to the final possibilities as
touching the woman in the case.
So Langholm came back from sultry London to a world of smoke and rain,
with furnaces flaring through the blurred windows, and the soot laid
with the dust in one of the grimiest towns in the island; but he soon
shook both from his feet, and doubled back upon the local line to a
rural station within a mile and a half of his cottage. This distance he
walked by muddy ways, through the peculiarly humid atmosphere created by
a sky that has rained itself out and an earth that can hold no more,
and came finally to his dripping garden by the wicket at the back of the
cottage. There he stood to inhale the fine earthy fragrance which atoned
somewhat for a rather desolate scene.
Pages:
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295