Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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He was sitting thus one evening, under the lamp, its soft mellow light falling on his silver hair; his glasses far down upon his high-bridged nose, his book held up before them. He breathed heavily as he read, and Emily, pausing an instant in the doorway, gazed upon him, thinking, with a love that to her had a touch of pathos, of all his kindly ways.

“All alone, as usual?” she said.

The old man took off his glasses slowly, closed his book upon them to mark his place, and then looked gravely up, waiting for her to speak.

“Father,” she said, “I’ve something to tell you.”

The tone was one to alarm the old man, and he sighed. He had reached the time of life when he dreaded change, and her tone had the note of change in it.

She sat down in a little rocking-chair before him, knitting her fingers together, her white hands lying in her lap. Her eyes were fixed upon a ring that sparkled on her finger—a ring that Garwood had bought, on credit, at Maxwell the jeweler’s, that morning. Harkness waited for her to speak with the same gravity with which he had waited for Garwood to speak an evening long ago, when the voting man had ventured in upon him, trying to assume a dignity the beating of his heart threatened, just as the beating of the old man’s heart now threatened the gravity he had assumed. Though there was a difference; the old man was aware that it was not well for him that his heart should beat as it was beating in that moment.