Читать книгу The Annes онлайн

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Kit stood with hanging head, her arm over his shoulders. He was distressed. Never had his aunt betrayed herself to him as now, and the vision of her destitution shocked his manhood, his ideals, his conscience. To have lived almost to her three score and ten, to be so clever, so strong, yet to have garnered no wheat, but only bright pebbles!

“Well, Kit,” Miss Carrington said, altering her tone and withdrawing her arm as she turned to leave him, “I’ll not ask for your answer now; in fact, I don’t want you to answer yet. But I beg you to remember that I implore you to marry Helen Abercrombie, and to marry soon. You are precisely the sort of boy who falls in love and makes a hopeless mess of his life from the loftiest plane of boundless idiocy. You were always quixotically lovable. I’m ready to admit that it is most charming in a boy, my dear, but it is fatal to a man. So listen to your doting aunt, and on your life do not disobey her! What are you going to do while I take my siesta?”

Kit felt, as his aunt meant him to feel it, the veiled threat in her warning, but he answered her question: