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قراءة كتاب A Bird of Passage and Other Stories
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
A BIRD OF PASSAGE AND OTHER STORIES
A BIRD OF PASSAGE AND OTHER STORIES
BY BEATRICE HARRADEN
AUTHOR OF "SHIPS THAT PASS IN THE NIGHT,"
"IN VARYING MOODS," ETC.
CHICAGO
DONOHUE, HENNEBERRY & CO.
407-425 DEARBORN ST.
1890
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
A BIRD OF PASSAGE.
BY BEATRICE HARRADEN.
It was about four in the afternoon when a young girl came into the salon of the little hotel at C. in Switzerland, and drew her chair up to the fire.
"You are soaked through," said an elderly lady, who was herself trying to get roasted. "You ought to lose no time in changing your clothes."
"I have not anything to change," said the young girl, laughing. "Oh, I shall soon be dry."
"Have you lost all your luggage?" asked the lady sympathetically.
"No," said the young girl, "I had none to lose." And she smiled a little mischievously, as though she knew by instinct that her companion's sympathy would at once degenerate into suspicion!
"I don't mean to say that I have not a knapsack," she added considerately. "I have walked a long distance--in fact from Z."
"And where did you leave your companions?" asked the lady, with a touch of forgiveness in her voice.
"I am without companions, just as I am without luggage," laughed the girl.
And then she opened the piano, and struck a few notes. There was something caressing in the way in which she touched the keys; whoever she was, she knew how to make sweet music; sad music too, full of that undefinable longing, like the holding out of one's arms to one's friends in the hopeless distance.
The lady bending over the fire looked up at the little girl, and forgot that she had brought neither friends nor luggage with her. She hesitated for one moment, and then she took the childish face between her hands and kissed it.
"Thank you, dear, for your music," she said gently.
"The piano is terribly out of tune," said the little girl suddenly, and she ran out of the room and came back carrying her knapsack.
"What are you going to do?" asked her companion.
"I am going to tune the piano," the little girl said; and she took a tuning-hammer out of her knapsack, and began her work in real earnest. She evidently knew what she was about, and pegged away at the notes as though her whole life depended on the result.
The lady by the fire was lost in amazement. Who could she be? Without luggage and without friends, and with a tuning hammer!
Meanwhile one of the gentlemen had strolled into the salon; but hearing the sound of tuning, and being in secret possession of nerves, he fled, saying, "The tuner, by Jove!"
A few minutes afterwards, Miss Blake, whose nerves were no secret possession, hastened into the salon, and in her usual imperious fashion demanded