Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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Yet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour.

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All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.

—GEORGE MACDONALD.

It was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mile. Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild.

The sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood. The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley, and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the grass and flowers.

During the day there had been rain—warm showers alternating with dazzling sunshine as in April—and now the earth, before going to sleep, was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen enjoyment.