...of an aftermath

Good nights were exchanged. Aunt Bertha and David's father, the former fervid, the latter stony, crossed snubbing glances. Invited by David's mother to pay them many visits, Mr Sternowitz accepted without too much zest, and after a bare smile from David's father, crowded out of the door in Aunt Bertha's lee. Silence followed. His father tilted his chair back against the wall with a violent thump and stared morosely at the ceiling. His mother cleared the dishes carefully, impinging on a look of anxiety, a look of abstraction. David wished they would talk. Silence only made his father more ominous. But the silence continued, and David feeling himself caught as if in talons of stress dared not move - at least not until his father spoke and eased the strain - and for escape meanwhile, could only stare at the new picture his mother had bought.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of brother-in-laws

Mr Sternowitz squirmed, blinked, dared not look at anyone. The hard-won relaxation of a few moments ago was destroyed entirely and everyone was on guard again. Nor was there any hope of the tension ever easing, since dinner was almost over, and there would be nothing more to divert one. David's mother assayed a few vague remarks. They went unanswered. In the strained silence, Aunt Bertha, who looked close to tears, kept muttering under her breath - 'Begrudges me everything...His spite, his sour silence...God blacken his destiny.' David looked around fearfully, hardly daring to think what might happen. Finally, Mr Sternowitz, after several preliminary coughs, thrust out his chin and smiled with forced and wavering heartiness.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of stairs

He became very fond of his own floor. There was a frosted skylight over the roofstair housing that diffused a cloudy yellow glow at morning and a soft grey haze at afternoon. After one climbed from the tumult of the street, climbed the lower, shadowier stairs, a little tense, listening to toilets, entering this light was like reaching a haven. There was a mild, relaxing hush about it, a luminous silence, static and embalmed. He would have liked to explore it, or at least to see whether the roof door was locked, but the thought of that height, that mysterious vacancy and isolation dissuaded him. There was something else besides. The stairs that led up were not like the stairs that led down, although both were made of stone. Common stairs were bevelled to an edge, hollowed to an aching trough by the tread of many feet, blackened beyond washing by the ground-in dirt of streets. But these that led up to the roof still had a pearliness mingled with their grey. Each slab was still square and clean. No palms of sliding hands had buffed the wrinkled paint from off their banisters. No palms had oiled them tusk-smooth and green as axe-helve. They were inviolable those stairs, guarding the light and the silence.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of finality

There was a horrible silence while they stared at the wad of paper on the table. Then his father slipped the bandaged hand free from the sling and began slowly stretching it back and forth to flex the cramped and clicking elbow. His face wore an expression of grim aloofness as though it were not his own hand he was experimenting with but someone else's. On his mother's features horror and pity were written. David gazed from one to the other and finally like theirs his eyes came to rest on the other hand that had just settled softly on the table, glimmering and peninsular on the green oilcloth. Minutes seemed to pass in a dull dragging vacancy in which no word was spoken. David looked up. His mother's face was unchanged as though that anguished look were caught in stone. But his father's face had become flushed, relaxed; the deep breath hissed softly at his nostrils. His eyelids had begun to linger at their shutting, opening not in one but in two stages. He spoke. Faint ratchets of effort against drowsiness and fatigue ticked and caught in his voice, thickening it. And as though to himself -

'I'll never go back to work there again. I'll never go back to printing at all. I'm through. Whatever work I do hereafter, it's going to be out doors - alone if I can. But out doors always... I'll not let myself be hemmed in by ink and iron any more. I don't want any foremen for my friends. I don't want anybody. I - I have no fortune with men.'

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of rage

And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body was smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented - so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and laboured as a croak.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of a witness to a beating

Suddenly he cringed. His eyelids blotted out the light like a shutter. The open hand struck him full against the cheek and temple, splintering the brain into fragments of light. Spheres, mercuric, splattered, condensed and roared. He fell to the floor. The next moment his father had snatched up the clothes hanger, and in that awful pause before it descended upon his shoulders, he saw with that accelerated vision of agony, how mute and open mouthed Yussie stood now, with what useless silence.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of a curious meeting

The truth was there was something quite untypical about their behaviour. The old peddler woman on the bench and the overalled men in the stern had seen enough husbands meeting their wives and children after a long absence to know how such people ought to behave. The most volatile races, such as the Italians, often danced for joy, whirled each other around, pirouetted in an ecstasy; Swedes sometimes just looked at each other, breathing through open mouths like a panting dog; Jews wept, jabbered, almost put each other's eyes out with the recklessness of their darting gestures; Poles roared and gripped each other at arm's length as though they meant to tear a handful of flesh; and after one pecking kiss, the English might be seen gravitating towards, but never achieving embrace. But these two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water - or if he turned his face towards his wife at all, it was only to glare in harsh contempt at the blue straw hat worn by the child in her arms, and then his hostile eyes would sweep about the deck to see if anyone else were observing them. And his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly. And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes. Altogether it was a very curious meeting.

[Call It Sleep, Roth, H.]

...of suspicion

No wind, not a sound, nothing; far away in the distance rumbled a train. There in that garden the silence was tense and still, and Bunny knew she was not alone. Someone was standing in the darkness, just as she was, motionless. Did he breathe? No, not a breath. And yet there was someone there.

[Little Man What Now?, Fallada, H.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of waking

Yet there were moments when waves of tenderness swept over her. But she was troubled by the unknown life bottled up in this body, the unknown dreams under the solid bone of the forehead. Sprawled at an angle across his chest, she could feel the man's respiration rising and falling like a wave, with the restlessness of an ocean crossing. Placing her ear against his skin, she could hear the hard beat of the heart, thumping like a motor, like the pound of a wreckers hammer. And the silence which ensued each time she uttered a word which pulled him from a dream. She counted the seconds between question and reply, as in a storm between the flash and the thunder - one ... two ... three ... He's already yonder, far beyond those fields. When he closed his eyes, she lifted up his head with her two hands, and found it as heavy as a dead man's, as heavy as a stone. 'What misery, my love!'

Strange fellow-voyager, this! Stretched out side by side without a word. With life flowing through you like a river. And the body, in a dizzying flight, launched on it like a dug-out canoe.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of a quietus

There she knew the language of the dead and was not afraid of it. Each added his silence to the silence of the house. One raised one's eyes from one's book, one held one's breath, one harkened to the call that had just expired. Why call them the departed when, among those that change, they alone are durable and their last looks so true that nothing else they did could ever gainsay them?

'Now I shall follow this man, I shall suffer and have doubts about him.' For she had only been able to sort out this human confusion of tenderness and harsh rebuffs in those who had found their quietus.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of mourning

There were the usual calls and expressions of condolence. It is difficult to speak without striking a pose; and sad memories which were thus stirred up within her were left to settle in an awkward silence. She carried her head high, and without faltering she uttered the word everyone was careful side-stepping - death. She wasn't going to let them catch in her own speech echoes of their own tentative phrases. She looked them straight in the eyes, so that they would not dare look at her, but as soon as she lowered her own...

Then there were others - those who walked with a calm, tranquil step across the hall, but who, on entering the drawing-room, took several hurried steps and fill into her arms. She offered them not a word. They choked her grief, pressing to their bosoms a contorted child.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of sunlight

She passed an antique shop. Genevieve thought of the knick-knacks in her drawing-room as traps for the sunlight. Everything that retains the light, that rises brightly to the surface gave her pleasure. She paused to savour the silent smile in that piece of crystal glassware - the smile that gleams at one from a rare old wine. In her weary consciousness light, health, and the certainty of life were all intermingled; and she longed to brighten the room of her sinking child with this reflected sunbeam, pinned there like a golden nail.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of keeping house

'Genevieve,' Bernis said to her, 'you still reign over everything.'

She had only to push back a table or draw up a chair and the delighted friend found himself perfectly at home. When the long day's work was done, what a silent tumult of scattered music, of damaged flowers - the ravages that friendship brings. Soundlessly, Genevieve restored piece to her kingdom. And Bernis could feel how distant in her and well defended was the little captive girl who once had loved him...

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of geography

The sun, continuing its course brought back the daylight. The Moors were quiet. Those that ventured as far as the Spanish fort gesticulated and handled their guns like toys. This was the Sahara viewed from the wings of the stage: the untamed tribes were stripped of their mystery and became bit-part players.

Thus we lived opposite each other, victims of our own distorting images. And it was why in this desert we felt no isolation; to appreciate the distance of our banishment we would have had to return home and to see it in perspective.

Captives of the Moors and of ourselves, we seldom ventured more than five hundred yards, there where the lawless wilderness began. Our nearest neighbours, at Cisneros and Port-Etienne, were five to six hundred miles away, also trapped by the Sahara, like flies in amber. We knew them by their surnames and their foibles, but between us there lay a silence as thick as interplanetary space.

[Southern Mail, Saint-Exupery, A. d.]

...of a new beginning

And he lay silent on the ground, pondering and waiting to see if his weakness, which still held him in chains, would disappear. The great silence which surrounded him now spread about a great peace, and his heart was calm and full of goodness.

[The Reformation of Gregor Samsa, Brand, K.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of a farmer

Ethan Frome drove in silence, the reins loosely held in his left hand, his brown-seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence.

[Ethan Frome, Wharton, E.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of quietning

There the silence had deepened about him year by year. Left alone, after his father's accident, to carry the burden of farm and mill, he had no time for convivial loiterings in the village; and when his mother fell ill the loneliness of the house grew more oppressive than that of the fields. His mother had been a talker in her day, but after her "trouble" the sound of her voice was seldom heard, though she had not lost the power of speech. Sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when in desperation her son asked her why she didn't "say something", she would lift a finger and answer:

'Because I'm listening", and on stormy nights, when the loud wind was about the house, she would complain, if he spoke to her: "They're talking so out there that I can't hear you."

[Ethan Frome, Wharton, E.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of a change in character

Then she too fell silent. Perhaps it was the inevitable effect of life on the farm, or perhaps, as she sometimes said, it was because Ethan "never listened". The charge was not wholly unfounded. When she spoke it was only to complain, and to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy; and to check a tendency to impatient retort he had first formed the habit of not answering her, and finally of thinking of other things while she talked. Of late, however, since he had reasons for observing her more closely, her silence had begun to trouble him. He recalled his mother's growing taciturnity, and wondered if Zeena were also turning "queer". Women did, he knew. Zeena, who had at her finger's ends the pathological chart of the whole region, had cited many cases of the kind whilst she was nursing his mother; and he himself knew of certain lonely farmhouses in the neighbourhood where stricken creatures pined, and of others where sudden tragedy had come of their presence. At times, looking at Zeena's shut face, he felt the chill of such forebodings. At other times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicious resentments impossible to guess.

[Ethan Frome, Wharton, E.]

- submitted by Pearce, M. A.

...of husband and wife

Nancy and Godfrey walked home under the starlight in silence. When they entered the oaken parlour, Godfrey threw himself into his chair, while Nancy laid down her bonnet and shawl, and stood on the hearth near her husband, unwilling to leave him even for a few minutes, and yet fearing to utter any word lest it might jar on his feeling. At last Godfrey turned his head towards her, and their eyes met, dwelling in that meeting without any movement on either side. That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger - not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.

[Silas Marner, Eliot, G.]

...of turmoil

A plain man like Godfrey Cass, speaking under some embarrassment, necessarily blunders on words that are coarser than his intentions, and that are likely to fall gratingly on susceptible feelings. While he had been speaking, Eppie had quietly passed her arm behind Silas's head, and let her hand rest against in caressingly: she felt him trembling violently. He was silent for some moments when Mr Cass had ended - powerless under the conflict of emotions, all alike painful. Eppie's heart was swelling at the sense that her father was in distress; and she was just going to lean down and speak to him, when one struggling dread at last gained mastery over every other in Silas, and he said, faintly -

"Eppie, my child, speak. I won't stand in your way. Thank Mr and Mrs Cass."

[Silas Marner, Eliot, G.]

...of the unconversant

"Well, Master Marner, its niver too late to turn over a new leaf, and if you've niver had no church, there's no telling the good it'll do you. For I feel so set up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been and heard the prayers, and the singing to the praise and glory o' God, as Mr Macey gives out - and Mr Crackenthorp saying good words, and more partic'lar on Sacramen' Day; and if a bit o' trouble comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I've looked for help i' the right quarter, and gev myself up to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at the last; and if we'n done our part, it isn't to be believed as Them as are above us 'ull be worse nor we are, and come short o' Their'n." Poor Dolly's exposition of her simple Raveloe theology fell rather unmeaningly on Silas's ears, for their was no word in it that could rouse a memory of what he had known as religion, and his comprehension was quite baffled by the plural pronoun, which was no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding a presumptuous familiarity. He remained silent, not feeling inclined to assent to the part of Dolly's speech which he fully understood - her recommendation that he should go to church. Indeed, Silas was so unaccustomed to talk beyond brief questions and answers necessary for the transaction of his simple business, that words did not easily come to him without the urgency of a distinct purpose.

[Silas Marner, Eliot, G.]

...of coincidence

Yet the next moment there seemed to be some evidence that ghosts had a more condescending disposition then Mr Macey attributed to them; for the pale figure of Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light, uttering no word, but looking round at the company with his strange unearthly eyes. The long pipes gave a simultaneous movement, like the antennae of startled insects, and every man present, not excepting even the skeptical farrier, had an impression that he saw, not Silas Marner in the flesh, but an apparition; for the door by which Silas had entered was hidden by the high-screened seats, and no one had noticed his approach. Mr Macey, sitting a long way off the ghost, might be supposed to have felt an argumentative triumph, which would tend to neutralise his share of the general alarm. Had he not always said that when Silas Marner was in that strange trance of his, his soul went loose from his body? Here was the demonstration: nevertheless, on the whole, he would have been as well contented without it. For a few moments there was a dead silence, Marner's want of breath and agitation not allowing him to speak. The landlord, under the habitual sense that he was bound to keep his house open to all company, and confident in the protection of his unbroken neutrality, at last took on himself the task of adjuring the ghost.

[Silas Marner, Eliot, G.]

...of a need for conversation

The conversation, which was at a high pitch of animation when Silas approached the door of the Rainbow, had, as usual, been slow and intermittent when the company first assembled. The pipes began to be puffed in a silence which had an air of severity; the more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended with embarrassing sadness. At last, Mr Snell, the landlord, a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke silence, by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher, -

"Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yesterday, Bob?"

[Silas Marner, Eliot, G.]

...of astonishment

I was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunder-stricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets, then, apparently recovering himself in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a cheque for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the cheque.

[The Purloined Letter, Poe, E. A.]

...of recall

At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the summer of 18-, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G-, the Prefect of the Parisian police.

[The Purloined Letter, Poe, E. A.]

...of a cards-player

Whist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by "the book", are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honour by honour, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or of chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognises what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation - all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party hand turned outward the faces of their own.

[The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe, E. A.]

...of a reunion

The next afternoon I walked over to the Shimerdas'. Yulka showed me the baby and told me that Antonia was shocking wheat on the southwest quarter. I went down across the fields, and Tony saw me from a long way off. She stood still by her shocks, leaning on her pitchfork, watching me as I came. We met like the people in the old song, in silence, if not in tears. Her warm hand clasped mine.

[My Antonia, Cather, W.]

...of a passenger conductor

Larry Donovan was a passenger conductor, one of those train-crew aristocrats who are always afraid that someone may ask them to put up a car-window, and who, if requested to perform such a menial service, silently point to the button that calls the porter. Larry wore this air of official aloofness even on the street, where there were no car-windows to compromise his dignity. At the end of his run he stepped indifferently from the train along with the passengers, his street hat on his head and his conductor's cap in an alligator-skin bag, went directly into the station and changed his clothes. It was a matter of utmost importance to him never to be seen in his blue trousers away from his train. He was usually cold and distant with men, but with all women he had a silent, grave familiarity, a special handshake, accompanied by a significant, deliberate look. He took women, married or single, into his confidence; walked them up and down in the moonlight, telling them what a mistake he had made by not entering the office branch of the service, and how much better fitted he was to fill the post of General Passenger Agent in Denver than the rough-shod man who bore that title. His unappreciated worth was the tender secret Larry shared with his sweethearts, and he was always able to make some foolish heart ache over it.

[My Antonia, Cather, W.]

...of a child

Next to Charley, I think she loved Nina best. Nina was only six, and she was rather more complex than the other children. She was fanciful, had all sorts of unspoken preferences, and was easily offended. At the slightest disappointment or displeasure, her velvety brown eyes filled with tears, and she would lift her chin and walk silently away. If we ran after her and tried to appease her, it did no good. She walked on unmollified. I used to think that no eyes in the world could grow so large or hold so many tears as Nina's. Mrs Harling and Antonia invariably took her part. We were never given a chance to explain. The charge was simply: 'You have made Nina cry. Now, Jimmy can go home, and Sally must get her arithmetic.' I liked Nina, too; she was so quaint and unexpected, and her eyes were lovely; but I often wanted to shake her.

[My Antonia, Cather, W.]

...of insults

They did not fail, when they met him, to make a certain gesture which consists of placing the left hand at the elbow of the bent right arm, and shaking the right clenched fist. Or again, as he walked by, they mouthed the obscene letter Z of the silent alphabet of insult used by the people of Nice, the Monegasques and the people from La Turbie and Menton.

[I: The Sodomites Minion from Three Stories of Divine Punishment, Apollinaire, G.]

- submitted by Pearce, M A.

...of the streets

The sight of an old man, crouched in a bus shelter, covered with an overcoat, started a train of thought on the difficulty of human life, and on the human tendency to increase its difficulty by useless movement. The thought that in three hours time, these streets would be crowded with people who possessed no motive beyond the working day, no deep certainties to counterbalance the confusion, made him grateful for the silence of the streets, and the inner silence of his own exhaustion.

[Ritual in the Dark, Wilson, C.]

- submitted by Pearce, M A.

...of a farewell

The silence hung between them, the silence in which there would normally have been thanks and disclaimers, vague arrangements to meet again. The situation seemed so full of latent comedy, of which she completely unaware, that he found it difficult not to smile. As he opened the door, she said: 'Goodbye, Gerard.'

[Ritual in the Dark, Wilson, C.]

- submitted by Pearce, M A.

...of a deathbed

I passed on with an accelerated step. On pausing at the chamber door I heard a very faint sound of many whispering voices. Eugene answered to my low, scarcely audible tap. The room was darkened. A dozen persons were gathered round the bed, and two others sat at a table on which stood four lit tapers; parchment, pens and ink lay before them. I was greeted in silence. Room was directly made for me to advance, and, on taking my station with the other medical men by the pillow, I had a full view of all who were present. The Countess Seymour sat in an armchair opposite; near her stood the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Fidena and the Earl of Northangerland. Mr Montmorency, Mr Warner, General Thornton, Viscount Castlereagh and the Earl of Arundel formed the rest of the circle. Some grave and important matter had evidently summoned them to the young monarch's dying bed. Deliberation, anxiety, earnest expectation sat on every brow, revealed dimly by the candlelight, which at this hour seemed an unnatural substitute for the broad radiance of day.

[The Spell, Bronte, C.]

...of sign-language

I made no answer. There was something very singular in the expression with which he regarded me. And at that moment the apparition of Finic glided in between us, and, gently yet firmly removing me from the Duke's touch, began to converse with him by means of signs. I looked on in silence as they wove their fingers into words as quickly as lightning, my Lord, every now and then, fixing his speaking eyes on the mute's countenance and reading what he would say there faster than even the language of signs could inform him.

[The Spell, Bronte, C.]

...of tact

But, Grandmama, my pen has run away from me. I have written on anything rather than the subject I intended to, which is certain inconsistencies in the Duke's conduct that times puzzle me most painfully. Since our marriage it has been my constant study, the business of my life, to watch the unfolding of his strange character, to read his heart (if I could), to become acquainted with all his antipathies that I might avoid them, and all his inclinations that I might continually follow them. Sometimes my efforts have been successful, sometimes unsuccessful, but upon the whole my attention or tact - as the Duke of Wellington calls it - has rather raised than lowered me in his good opinion. You know I am practised in this kind of silent vigilance. I used to exercise it towards my dear father. Ever since I can remember I have watched the proper moments when to speak and when to be silent. I have studied his likes and dislikes, and rigidly striven to gratify the former and avoid the latter. It was natural for me then, when I became the wife of one whom I loved so inexpressibly as Zamorna, to exert every effort to please him. Yet in spite of all, sometimes he is unaccountably cool - not unkind, I cannot say that - but it is the kindness of a friend rather than a husband. And then he changes so suddenly. And there are other little mysterious incidents connected with these changes which nobody saw but me and which I reveal to none. An example or two will best explain my meaning.

[The Spell, Bronte, C.]

...of surveying

Everywhere the tall figure of the slender youth, in his close black dress and unornamental cap thickly cinctured with curls, might be seen passing along with commanding tread and bearing, controlling all around him like the sovereign spirit of the storm. Sometimes that shape appeared lofty against the sky, standing on a thread-like scaffolding, a blue abyss of air on each side, before and behind the skeleton erection of an unfinished palace, honeycombed with arches, and vast beams flung across as the divisions of state chambers, between voids that might turn the head of a cabin boy giddy. And here the monarch walked as fearlessly as an eagle hangs, poised above his eyrie. The eyes of his stern and swarthy subjects were often turned admiringly on him as he sprung like a young elk from one narrow projection to another, and strode over the shaking beams as erectly and haughtily as if he were crossing a hall of Wellesley House. At other times the eye might single him out, overtopping a throng of subordinates, gathered around the pit of some half-sunk foundation, watching intently while a train was laid to blast the rocks beneath, and, when the whole infernal disposition was completed, giving the order to fall back in his own full and thrilling tones, lingering the last on the path of retreat, and, as the heaven-rending thunder burst up from its stony tomb in a crack that shook hill and plain, far and near, commencing the triumphant huzza, whose swell arose as the peal of the rock-quake died into groaning echoes. But when all this was past, towards evening, when the workmen had retired from the busy scene, when the architects and master masons and carpenters had gathered their rules, squares, compasses, etc., and departed, then might a spectator, if any at that time tarried on the scene, discern that stately form sitting solitary on the rough-hewn steps of an embryo hall. All around him silent, lonely, desolate. Still as Tadmor in the wilderness, voiceless as Tyre on the forsaken sea. Mallet, hammer, axe and chisel all unheard. The blast-thunder of the day forgotten, the shouts of the labourers asleep, their echoing footsteps passed away, and the lull of twilight stealing on a faint wind, and the low moan of the old inhabited town down from heaven, up from earth, through the becalmed region. At such an hour Zamorna's figure would be visible, sole inhabitant of his rising city, his arms probably folded on his breast; his eyes fixed with a mingled expression of thought and vigilance (not much of sorrow) on the yellow prairie stretching eastward before him, and finding no boundary save the golden skyline; the brow of youth and beauty, clothed with a cloud of sternness that lay on it as the shadow of an ominous sky lies on the white marble wall of a palace; the fresh red lips closely met, as placidly motionless as of eternal silence had fixed them with her seal, and no token of deep emotion apparent, of any feeling, indeed, save absorbing meditation, except the varying hue of the cheek, which now and then, at long intervals, died suddenly away from its ordinary warm bright flush to a stricken and colourless pallor. Then it might be known there was a worm gnawing at the heart, that some pang, of deadlier agony than usual, had called the blood back to its source. But ere long the pure eloquent glow would steal again over the whitened complexion, and as the Duke slightly changed his position and turned his eyes more fixedly to the dim east, or perhaps let them fall on the reedy banks of the Calabar, it was evident his spirit had, for a time at least, conquered its inward tormentor, and that plans of warlike or political ambition were once more forced into predominance over the paternal anguish whose recurrence racked him so bitterly.

[The Spell, Bronte, C.]