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Strangers and pilgrims, by the author of 'Lady Audley's secret'.
Strangers and pilgrims by the author of 'Lady Audley's secret' Author:Mary Elizabeth Braddon Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. ' Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast: the one struggles to separate itself from the other. The one chugs with obstinate fondness to the world, wit... more »h organs like cramps of steel; the other lifts itself majestically from the mist to the realms of an exalted ancestry.' A Sunny afternoon in the second week of May, one of those brilliant spring days which cheat the dweller in cities, who has no indications of the year's progress around and about him—no fields of newly-sprouting corn, or hedges where the blackthorn shows silvery- white above grassy banks dappled with violets and primroses—into the belief that summer is at hand. The citizen has no succession of field birds to serve for his time-keepers, but he hears canaries and piping bullfinches carolling in balconies, perhaps sees a flower-girl at a street-corner, and begins to think he is in the month of roses. It seemed the month of roses in one small drawing-room in Eaton-place-south—a back drawing-roomand of the tiniest, with a fernery of dark green glass, artfully contrived to shed a dim religious light upon the chamber, and at the same time mask the view of an adjacent mews—the daintiest possible thing in the way of back drawing-rooms, furnished with chairs and dwarf couches of the pouff species, covered with cream- coloured cretonne and befrilled muslin; a coffee-table or two in convenient corners; the clock on the maroon-velvet-covered mantelpiece, a chubby Cupid in turquoise Sevres beating a drum; the candelabra, two other chubby blue bantlings struggling under their burden of wax-candles; curtains of maroon velvet and old Flemish lace half screening the fire in the low steel grate. Ensconced in the most luxurious of the pouffs, with her feet on the tapestried fender-stool (a joint labour of the four Luttr...« less