قراءة كتاب The Potter's Thumb

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‏اللغة: English
The Potter's Thumb

The Potter's Thumb

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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THE POTTER'S THUMB







BY

FLORA ANNIE STEEL







LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1900







All rights reserved







CONTENTS


CHAPTER I


CHAPTER II


CHAPTER III


CHAPTER IV


CHAPTER V


CHAPTER VI


CHAPTER VII


CHAPTER VIII


CHAPTER IX


CHAPTER X


CHAPTER XI


CHAPTER XII


CHAPTER XIII


CHAPTER XIV


CHAPTER XV


CHAPTER XVI


CHAPTER XVII


CHAPTER XVIII


CHAPTER XIX


CHAPTER XX


CHAPTER XXI


CHAPTER XXII


CHAPTER XXIII


CHAPTER XXIV


CHAPTER XXV


CHAPTER XXVI


CHAPTER XXVII


CHAPTER XXVIII






THE POTTER'S THUMB





CHAPTER I


'Tis only the potter's thumb, Huzoor.'

As she raised the parti-coloured rag covering the child's body, the noonday sun streamed down upon a pitiful sight. Yet her eyes, despite the motherhood which lay in them, accepted it, as the sun did, calmly. Emotion, such as it was, being reserved for the couple of Englishmen who stood by: and even there curiosity and repulsion froze the surface of pity, especially in the younger of the two faces.

In good sooth, not a pleasant sight for mankind, to whom sickness does not as a rule bring that quick interest born of a desire to aid which it does to most women. The brown skin was fair with the pallor of disease, and the fine, sparse, black hair showed the contour of the skull. The unnatural hollows of the temples emphasised the unnatural prominence of the closed eyelids, round whose ragged margin of clogged lashes the flies settled in clusters. Below this death's-head was an over-large body, where, despite its full curves, each rib stood sharply defined, and whence the thin limbs angled themselves in spidery fashion.

'The potter's thumb?' echoed Dan Fitzgerald interrogatively. He was a tall man, broad in the shoulders, lean in the flank, and extraordinarily handsome; yet the most noticeable quality in the face looking down at the very ordinary woman squatting upon a very ordinary dust-heap, was

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