Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

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Yours sincerely,

Edward T. Garrett.

Leacraft put down the letter slowly. He was disappointed. A summons to the west, to the mines in Arizona, had reached him just the day before, and he must get out there before a week was over. He had thought to have finished this affair first, and to find in the tiresome trip distraction, if Sally was unfavorable to his appeal, or unexpected interest if he succeeded in winning her assent. Still he could readily accept the invitation. He would be back in May, and, perhaps after all the occasion might be more favorable. Sally softened into a little sympathetic humor by her visit to her sick aunt, and he strengthened by the encouraging reflexion of having successfully dissipated the little cloud of misunderstanding, or worse, at the mines, might produce conditions psychologically adequate to bring about his victory.

He stepped to the window. The view from it was always pleasing, at this moment in the descending shades of the closing day and with the vanishing lights hurrying westward beyond the Potomac, it possessed an ineffable loveliness. The great white spectre of the Washington monument, immaterialized and faintly roseate against the softly flaming skies, and brooding genius-like above the trees of the Reservation was always there, and that night it assumed the strangely deceptive but fascinating vagary of an exhalation, as if built up from the emanations of the earth, and the vapors of the air, remaining immobile in the still ether as a portent or a promise. The man’s face grew clouded as the fairy obelisk faded, and with the enveloping darkness became again discernible as a dull and stony pile.