English fiction -- 19th century; Marriage -- Fiction
'P.S.-My Lord Tyrant has departed--as on other occasions. The prisoner
of his word is sure to take his airing before he presents himself to
redeem it. His valet is left to pay bills, fortunately for Livia. She
entrusted her purse yesterday to a man picked up on the road by my lord,
that he might play for her. Captain Abrane assured her he had a star,
and Mr. Potts thought him a rush compere, an adept of those dreadful
gambling tables. Why will she continue to play! The purse was returned
to her, without so much as a piece of silver in it; the man has flown.
Sir M. Corby says, he is a man whose hands betray him--or did to Sir M.;
expects to see him one day on the wrong side of the criminal bar. He
struck me as not being worse than absurd. He was, in any case, an unfit
companion, and our C. would help to rescue the Eccentric from such
complicating associates. I see worlds of good she may do. Happily, he
is no slave of the vice of gambling; so she would not suffer that
anxiety. I wish it could be subjoined, that he has no malicious pleasure
in misleading others. Livia is inconsolable over her pet, young Lord
Cressett, whom he yesterday induced to "try his luck"--with the result.
We leave, if bills are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr. Potts
left this afternoon; just enough to carry them home. Papa and your
blissful sister out driving. Riette within her four walls and signing
herself,
'THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.'
CHAPTER XIII
AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION
'It is a dark land,' Carinthia said, on seeing our Island's lowered
clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer
white cliffs.
--She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane, when first she
beheld Old England's shores, tossing in the packet-boat on a wild Channel
sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family that she did; and
no wonder that she should, the day being showery from the bed of the sun,
after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn. We used to have an
eye of our own for English weather before printed Meteorological
Observations and Forecasts undertook to supplant the shepherd and the
poacher, and the pilot with his worn brown leather telescope tucked
beneath his arm. All three would have told you, that the end of a three
days' frost in the late season of the year and the early, is likely to
draw the warm winds from the Atlantic over Cornish Land's End and Lizard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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