End of the world -- Fiction; Epidemics -- Fiction; Science fiction; Twenty-first century -- Fiction
Raymond had never visited the dwellings of want, and the scene that now
presented itself struck him to the heart. The floor was sunk in many
places; the walls ragged and bare—the ceiling weather-stained—a
tattered bed stood in the corner; there were but two chairs in the
room, and a rough broken table, on which was a light in a tin
candlestick;—yet in the midst of such drear and heart sickening
poverty, there was an air of order and cleanliness that surprised him.
The thought was fleeting; for his attention was instantly drawn towards
the inhabitant of this wretched abode. It was a female. She sat at the
table; one small hand shaded her eyes from the candle; the other held a
pencil; her looks were fixed on a drawing before her, which Raymond
recognized as the design presented to him. Her whole appearance
awakened his deepest interest. Her dark hair was braided and twined in
thick knots like the head-dress of a Grecian statue; her garb was mean,
but her attitude might have been selected as a model of grace. Raymond
had a confused remembrance that he had seen such a form before; he
walked across the room; she did not raise her eyes, merely asking in
Romaic, who is there? “A friend,” replied Raymond in the same dialect.
She looked up wondering, and he saw that it was Evadne Zaimi. Evadne,
once the idol of Adrian’s affections; and who, for the sake of her
present visitor, had disdained the noble youth, and then, neglected by
him she loved, with crushed hopes and a stinging sense of misery, had
returned to her native Greece. What revolution of fortune could have
brought her to England, and housed her thus?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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