The Heart Line: A Drama of San FranciscoBurgess, Gelett
General
The Heart Line: A Drama of San Francisco
Burgess, Gelett
Bohemianism -- Fiction; Fortune-tellers -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction
He ran to a little bath-room beside the closet, brought a bottle and
spoon, poured out a dose of the medicine and put it to her lips.
Finally she sat up, listening.
"Somebody’s coming. _She_ is coming! Come here, Francis! Quickly!"
Taking him by the hand, she led him to the closet in the back room,
pushed him inside, closed the door and locked it.
It was dark in the closet, but he knew its contents as well as if he
could see them. Upon a row of shelves were account-books and papers
covered with dust. On nails in the wall his own small stock of clothes
hung, and in a wooden box on the floor were his playthings—blocks, a
wooden horse, several precious bits of twine and leather, a collection
of spools and a toy globe. He sat down on this box patiently and
waited.
Presently there came a knock at the hall door. Madam Grant opened it and
some one entered. He heard his guardian’s voice saying:
"Come in, Grace, here I am, such as I am, and here you are, such as you
are." Then her voice changed, becoming tremulous and excited. "Ah, but
she’s beautiful! May I kiss her, Grace? Oh, what eyes! Her father’s
eyes, aren’t they? Don’t be afraid, Grace, let her come to me."
There was a reply in a soft voice which Francis could not make out, as
they passed into the front room. He tried to peep through the keyhole,
but as the key had been left in, he could see nothing. He sat down upon
the box again to wait, playing with his toy globe. After a while he
noticed a thin streak of light admitted by a crack in the panel of the
door, and rose to see if he could see through it. At the height of his
eye it was too narrow to show him anything in the room, but farther up
it widened. He pulled down several account-books from the shelves and
piled them upon the box. Standing tiptoe upon these, he found that he
could get a clear though limited view of the bay-window.
Here a little girl sat quietly, vividly illuminated in the sunshine.
She was scarcely more than four years of age and was dressed in a navy
blue silk frock whose collar and pockets were elaborately trimmed with
ruffles of white satin and bows of ribbon. She wore a white muslin cap
decorated with ribbon, lace and rosebuds; white stockings showed above
her high buttoned boots; her hair was a truant mass of fine-spun
threads, curling, tawny yellow. Her face was round, her eyes
extraordinarily wide apart under level, straight brows. What caught and
held his attention, however, as he watched, was a velvety mole upon her
left cheek, so placed as to be a piquant ornament rather than a
disfigurement to her countenance. She sat listening, tightly holding a
woolly lamb in her plump little arms. The two women were out of his
range of vision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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