Young Lives

Young Lives

Behind the Venetian blinds of a respectable middle-class, fifty-pound-a-year, "semi-detached," "family" house, in a respectable middle-class road of the little north-county town of Sidon, midway between the trees of wealth upon the hill, and the business quarters that ended in squalor on the bank of the broad and busy river,--a house boasting a few shabby trees of its own, in its damp little rockeried slips of front and back gardens,--on a May evening some ten or twelve years ago, a momentous crisis of contrasts had been reached. The house was still as for a battle. It was holding its breath to hear what was going on in the front parlour, the door of which seemed to wear an expression of being more than usually closed. A mournful half-light fell through a little stained-glass vestibule into a hat-racked hall, on the walls of which hung several pictures of those great steamships known as "Atlantic liners" in big gilt frames--pictures of a significance presently to be noted. A beautiful old eight-day clock ticked solemnly to the flickering of the hall lamp. From below came occasionally a furtive creaking of the kitchen stairs. The two servants were half way up them listening. The stairs a flight above the hall also creaked at intervals. Two young girls, respectively about fourteen and fifteen, were craning necks out of nightdresses over the balusters in a shadowy angle of the staircase. On the floor above them three other little girls of gradually diminishing ages slept, unconscious of the issues being decided between their big brother and their eldest sister on the one side, and their father and mother on the other, in the front parlour below. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 10922
Author: Le Gallienne, Richard
Release Date: Feb 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English