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The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad
page 36 of 385 (09%)
morning in his own old garden full of thrushes and other small
birds. She was sitting on a stone, a fragment of some old
balustrade, with her feet in the damp grass, and reading a tattered
book of some kind. She had on a short, black, two-penny frock (une
petite robe de deux sous) and there was a hole in one of her
stockings. She raised her eyes and saw him looking down at her
thoughtfully over that ambrosian beard of his, like Jove at a
mortal. They exchanged a good long stare, for at first she was too
startled to move; and then he murmured, "Restez donc." She lowered
her eyes again on her book and after a while heard him walk away on
the path. Her heart thumped while she listened to the little birds
filling the air with their noise. She was not frightened. I am
telling you this positively because she has told me the tale
herself. What better authority can you have . . .?" Blunt paused.

"That's true. She's not the sort of person to lie about her own
sensations," murmured Mills above his clasped hands.

"Nothing can escape his penetration," Blunt remarked to me with
that equivocal urbanity which made me always feel uncomfortable on
Mills' account. "Positively nothing." He turned to Mills again.
"After some minutes of immobility--she told me--she arose from her
stone and walked slowly on the track of that apparition. Allegre
was nowhere to be seen by that time. Under the gateway of the
extremely ugly tenement house, which hides the Pavilion and the
garden from the street, the wife of the porter was waiting with her
arms akimbo. At once she cried out to Rita: 'You were caught by
our gentleman.'

"As a matter of fact, that old woman, being a friend of Rita's
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