成人动漫专区_成人专区_国产女王免费调教专区_国产专区

TWO:ARTISTS AT WORK. ARTISTS AT WORK.

TWO:A certain measure of relief came to poor Alice at this moment, for she observed that everybody had finished the meat-course, and she and Hugh (who had at present escaped the lash of his grandmother��s tongue) and John hastily got up and began changing their elders�� plates, and removing dishes. This was the custom of Sunday lunch at Mrs Keeling��s, and a Sabbatarian design of saving the servants trouble lay at the back of it. The detail of which it took no account was that it gave Hugh and Alice and John three times as much trouble as it would have given the servants, for they made endless collisions with each other as they went round the table; two of them simultaneously tried to drag the roast beef away in opposite directions, and the gravy spoon, tipped up by John��s elbow, careered through the air with a comet-tail of congealed meat-juice behind it. Ominous sounds of side-slip from heaped plates and knives came from the dinner wagon, where the used china was piled, and some five minutes of arduous work, filled with bumpings and crashings and occasional spurts of suppressed laughter from John, who, like a true wit, was delighted with his own swift and disconcerting reply to his Granny, were needful to effect the changes required for the discussion of plum tart and that strange form of refreshment known as{23} ��cold shape.�� During these resonant minutes further conversation between the elders was impossible, but Mrs Goodford was not wasting her time, but saving up, storing her forces, reviewing her future topics.

TWO:To-night as he thought over this, when the hour was quiet, and upstairs Alice kept vigil, Norah��s presence seemed to haunt the room. She had only been here once, but he could remember with such distinctness the trivial details of that afternoon, that his imagination gave him her again, now standing by the book-shelves, now seated in one of the chairs he had brought in that day, and kept here since. They would be needed again, he hoped, next Sunday, for with the arrival of the Leonardo book he had an adequate excuse for asking her again, and, he hoped, an adequate cause for her acceptance. There it lay on the table still unopened, and in the clinking of the ashes in the grate, and the night-wind that stirred in the bushes outside, he heard with the inward ear the sound of her voice, just a word or two spoken through the wind.