Page:The Sea Lady.djvu/291

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THE CRISIS



foreboding, that sinister promise of an escape, that whisper of "other dreams," that had dominated his mind only a short half-hour before?

He turned his face back to Sandgate, his mind a theatre of warring doubts. Quite vividly he could see the Sea Lady as Lady Poynting Mallow saw her, as something pink and solid and smart and wealthy, and, indeed, quite abominably vulgar, and yet quite as vividly he recalled her as she had talked to him in the garden, her face full of shadows, her eyes of deep mystery, and the whisper that made all the world about him no more than a flimsy, thin curtain before vague and wonderful, and hitherto, quite unsuspected things.

V

Chatteris was leaning against the railings. He started violently at Melville's

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