cs反恐下载

But the barest hint of illness in connection with Richard was enough to make her mind swerve, with a sudden jerk, from herself and her own troubles, to him. Desperately as she would miss him, and need him, yet she had small doubt �� something within told her so �� that, when she stood face to face with things, she would contrive to get on somehow. But he! �� how would he ever manage without her? . . . to nerve him and to soothe him, and to listen to his outpourings �� away from her, he quite literally would not have a soul to speak to. She saw him on the outward voyage, eternally pacing the deck, a prey to blackest anxiety �� and the last thought of self went under, in a fierce uprush of pity for him, so solitary, so self �� centred, so self-tormented. Oh, that he might be spared the worst! He was old for his age; much too old to have to begin life afresh �� life which, with every caprice satisfied, had yet become so hard for him: an hourly tussle with flimsy, immaterial phantoms, whose existence other people never so much as dreamed of. And to know him pinched for money again, going short, denying himself, fretting over the straits to which he had brought her and the children . . . no! Mary felt there was nothing, absolutely nothing she would not do, to help him, to spare him.

��I told him I couldn��t be sure. But, Richard, there��s nobody else �� unless he rides all the way to Brixeter. And there and back would take him at least four hours. His brother might be dead by then. Their mother is almost out of her mind, poor thing.��

Quaint home-sicknesses cropped up, too. On board was a skinny little colonist from the Moreton Bay district, with, as the Irish wit of the company had it, ��the face of his own granddad upon his shoulders���� who was, that is to say, more deeply wrinkled than the bewrinkled rest. Where this man came from, dirt was not: the little weatherboard houses were as clean when they dropped to pieces as when first run up. He it was who now confessed to an odd itch to see again the grime and squalor of London town: the shiny black mud that served as mortar to the paving-stones; the beds of slush into which, on a rainy day, the crossing-sweepers voluptuously plunged their brooms; the smoke-stained buildings; monuments tarred with the dirt of ages. He wanted to feel his cheek stung by the mixture of flying fodder and dry ordure that whirls the streets, does the east wind go; to sniff the heavy smell of soot and frost that greets the Londoner��s nose on a winter morning �� even to choke and smother in a London fog.

For Mary had been out spending a couple of days with the young pair at Heidelberg, to pay her overdue respects to the cottage of which she had heard so much.

Zara looked so annoyed when this happened that Mary tried to seem unobservant. But after one particularly violent explosion, the words: ��Oh, what do you do for it?�� escaped her in spite of herself.

What a home-coming that was! No sooner had the ship cast anchor than rowing-boats began to push off from the pier; while one that had been lying on its oars made for them with all speed. Mary, standing hatted and shawled for landing, looked, looked again, rubbed her eyes and exclaimed: ��Why, I do declare if it isn��t Tilly! Oh, RICHARD, what a difference the weeds make!�� And sure enough a few minutes later Tilly��s head came bobbing up over the side, and the two women lay in each other��s arms half laughing, half crying, drawing back, first one, then the other, the better to fix her friend. Certainly Tilly had never shown to more advantage. In old days her hats had been flagrant, her silks over-sumptuous, her jewellery too loud. Now, the neat widow��s bonnet with its white frill and black hangings formed a becoming frame for her yellow-brown hair, tanned skin and strong white teeth; the chains, lockets and brooches of twenty-two-carat Ballarat gold had given way to decorous jet; the soft black stuff of the dress moulded and threw up every good point in the rich, full-bosomed figure. Silently Mary noted and rejoiced. But Tilly, one glance snatched, blurted out: ��Well, I must say England ��asn��t done much for you, my dear! In all my days, Mary, never did I see you look so peaked and pasty. Seasickness? Not it! It��s that HORRIBLE climate you��ve ��ad to put up with. I declare your very letters �� with their rain, rain, and fog, fog �� used to gimme the blue devils. Well! you��ve come back ��ere to the finest climate in the world. We��ll ��ave you up to the mark again in a brace o�� shakes.��