Vashti's Fate — page 194: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WORSE AND WORSE. 189 that all the country round knows more about us than we do ourselves? Ah, Philip, Philip, did you and Aunt Mar- gery think we could grow up under the ghostly drapings of that old Hermitage, and never find out what a rare, won- derful heritage was ours? Why, man, this execrable in- heritance has been thrown in my face a dozen times a week ever since I can remember. I have broken every other fel- lows head at New Heaven for something of the sort. Philip Bryce, out with it. What in Heaven's name is the doom that hangs over these old barracks? Will you tell_ me, I say?” He had risen, with a burst of fiery gesticulation, as he spoke, and waited, with a heaving chest, the old man’s response. Philip Bryce had risen, too, and with his clasped hands holding by the high old-fashioned mantel-piece, lifted his misty eyes to the portrait over it, dropping them with a wild misgiving to the young face so like—so like in its fierce eagerness of questioning, that his old and well-nigh broken heart seemed to die within him. “Will you tell me, old man?” almost screamed Frank. ‘“Gold help me now; God help me!” said Margery Gresham to herself, as, unable to endure longer the echo of the-scene in the sitting-room, she opened the door and came in, with slow, deliberate step. ‘‘Aunt Margery, will you tell me? I shall go mad over the uncertainty_of the doom that I know hangs over my race. This muffled, unknown dread, meets me at every turn. It is forever booming*in my ear in the midst of the rush of every-day life, like the sound of a funeral bell at sea, 3) «Sit down, Francis Everleigh—calm yourself. I can (efoy ng) Cc / awe! 2 - <p ha P ———— ~ é t Sis _ . Singe. = - Ys ~e,. 0, a a be so ah ae Ia ae cS (E(@) ,00 Nn