时间：<2020-07-08 00:38:41 作者：rt3国演义动画版nIm 浏览量：9777
The cadence died. "Flora! your dream is true and that's the battery! It's going, Flora. It's gone! Your brother's gone! Your brother, Flora, your brother! Charlie! he's gone." So crying Anna sprang to the window and with unconscious ease threw it up.
"Blushing! Every time I get a little warm--" The speaker rose to go, but the sister kept her hand:
"Don't wait till then," crisply said the Doctor.
Till the horns grew out of her tail, tail, tail,"But how did it go; was it--?"
As the rearmost ship was passing the house Anna, her comeliness restored, half rose from her bed, where Miranda stood trying to keep her. From all the far side of the house remotely sounded the smart tramp and shuffle of servants clearing away wreckage, and the din of their makeshift repairs. She was "all right again," she said as she sat, but the abstraction of her eyes and the harkening droop of her head showed that inwardly she still saw and heard the death-struck boy."It wasn't!" silently said Anna's lips, her face averted. Suddenly she turned and clutched her sister's hands: "Oh, Con, while we talk trifles Flora's home lies in ashes!... Yes, he told me so just now."
He lifted his tool for silence, and fresh anger wrung her soul to see joy mount in his eyes as from somewhere below the old coachman sang:"Bet. 'He has bet three-ee général' he'll pazz down Canal Street and through the middl' of the city, unreco'nize! And now he's done it, they'll let him do the rest!" From his Creole eyes the enthusiast blazed a complete argument, that an educated commander, so disguised and traversing an enemy's camp, can be worth a hundred of the common run who go by the hard name of spy, and may decide the fortunes of a whole campaign: "They'll let him! and he'll get the prom-otion!"
"Missy?" he tenderly ventured. But the lids still drooped, though she rose.What should she do? Here was grandma, better aid than forty Irbys; but with both phases of her problem to deal with at once--how to trip headlong this wild matrimonial leap and how to seize this treasure by whose means she might leave Anna in a fallen city and follow Hilary to the war--she was at the end of her daintiest wits. She talked on with the gray man, for that kept him from the show-case. In an air full of harmonies and prattle, of fluttering draperies, gliding feet, undulating shoulders, twinkling lights, gallantry, fans, and perfume, she dazzled him with her approval when he enlarged on the merits of Kincaid and when he pledged all his powers of invention to speed the bridal. Frantic to think what better to do, she waltzed with him, while he described the colonel of the departing regiment as such a martinet that to ask him to delay his going would only hasten it; waltzed on when she saw her grandmother discover the knife's absence and telegraph her a look of contemptuous wonder. But ah, how time was flying! Even now Kincaid must be returning hitherward, licensed!"You went farther? How could you?"
"Oh-h! Oh-h!" panted Anna, "you're too cruel! Hilary Kincaid wears no chain of mine!""You mean--his?" asked the absorbed embroiderer. But on her last word she stiffened upward with a low cry of agony, shut her eyes and swung her head as if about to faint. Flora had risen.
Instead, with an agony of fondness, she glided to him. Distress held him as fast and mute as at the flag presentation. But when she would have knelt he caught her elbows and held her up by force."Miss Anna," murmured Hilary with a meekness it would have avenged Charlie to hear, "I've only given you the right you claim for every woman."
"Yes, sometimes; but not to her, any more. Oh, Flora, if it's just as true of you, you won't be--begrudge my saying it of my sister--that no saint ever went to her matyrdom better prepared than she is, right now, for the very worst that can be told. There's only one thing to which she never can and never will resign herself, and that is doubt. She can't breathe its air, Flora. As she says herself, she isn't so built; she hasn't that gift."The sister sighed: "Nan Callender, you are the poorest fisherman--"