Lucinda Author:Anthony Hope General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1920 Original Publisher: D. Appleton and company Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where... more » you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV THE FOURTH PARTY AS Sir Paget had suggested, we -- we three Ril- lington men and Aunt Bertha -- spent the Twelve Days, the ever-famous Twelve Days before the war, at Cragsfoot. On the public side of that period I need say nothing -- or only just one thing. If we differed at all from the public at large in our feelings, it was in one point only. For us, under Sir Paget's lead, it was less a time of hope, fear, and suspense than of mere waiting. We other three took his word for what was going to happen; his certainty became ours -- though, as I believe (it is a matter of belief only, for he never told me what he told Waldo on that walk of theirs on the afternoon of the wedding day -- which was not the day of a wedding), his certainty was based not so much on actual information as on a sort of instinct which long and intimate familiarity with international affairs had given him. But, whatever was his rock of conviction, it never shook. Even Waldo did not question it. He accepted it -- with all its implications, public and private. Yes, and private. There his acceptance was not only absolute; it was final and -- a thing which I found it difficult to understand -- it was absolutely silent. He never referred to his project of pursuit -- and of rescue, or revenge, or whatever else it had been going to be. He never mentioned Luanda's name; we were at pains never to pronounce it in his presence. It was extraordinary self-control on the part of a man whom self-control could, on occasion, utterly forsake. So many people are not proof against gossiping even...« less