"I should--have turned back, my boy." After a silence the hero said more to himself than to me "Ah, if my brother were here to-night--I might live!""I think you know Lieutenant Durand?" asked the General, with a quizzical eye.
FORE:I think Mr Keeling had much better not bother about a cab for me, she said. I can perfectly well walk home.{140}I sprang for the door, but the fire-log sent me sprawling with my shoulder on the threshold. As I went down I heard in the same breath the wounded officer wailing "Go back! go in! there are only four of them! don't leave one alive!" and Miss Harper all but screaming "Our men! our men! God be praised, our men are coming, they are here! Fly spoilers, for your lives, fly!"
ONE:He paused a moment.
TWO:"Like whom?"A faint stir at the threshold caught my ear and I discerned in the hall a young negro woman. The light of an unseen candle made her known at a glance; she had been here since the previous evening, as I knew, though it chanced that I had not seen her; Oliver's best wedding-gift, the slave maid whom I had seen with Charlotte in the curtained wagon at Gallatin. I stole out to her; she courtesied. "Miss Charlotte say ef you want he'p you fine me a-sett'n' on de step o' de stairs hafe-ways down."
THREE:Oh, maynt I began John, with an eye to cherries.
FORE:"There now!" exclaimed Mrs. Masters, hastily arranging an antimacassar on the back of a chair, "I won't tell you that, because, of course, I don't know."
No excuse necessary, my lord, said Keeling. Please take a chair.Oh, you just wait till he does, and that wont be a very long wait, she said. You think youll be shy and nervous, but you wont when your turn comes. Ill be bound you like him well enough really.They opened the windows and looked out. Sure enough, the plain[Pg 43] was covered, away to the south, with a dark expanse like a forest, but, unlike a forest, it appeared to be in motion. Very soon it was apparent that what seemed to be a forest was a herd of animals.