Read Books Online, for Free |
The Last Days At Home | H. G. [Herbert George] Wells | |
Part 3 |
Page 1 of 2 |
She dressed carefully for dinner in a black dress that her father liked, and that made her look serious and responsible. Dinner was quite uneventful. Her father read a draft prospectus warily, and her aunt dropped fragments of her projects for managing while the cook had a holiday. After dinner Ann Veronica went into the drawing-room with Miss Stanley, and her father went up to his den for his pipe and pensive petrography. Later in the evening she heard him whistling, poor man! She felt very restless and excited. She refused coffee, though she knew that anyhow she was doomed to a sleepless night. She took up one of her father's novels and put it down again, fretted up to her own room for some work, sat on her bed and meditated upon the room that she was now really abandoning forever, and returned at length with a stocking to darn. Her aunt was making herself cuffs out of little slips of insertion under the newly lit lamp. Ann Veronica sat down in the other arm-chair and darned badly for a minute or so. Then she looked at her aunt, and traced with a curious eye the careful arrangement of her hair, her sharp nose, the little drooping lines of mouth and chin and cheek. Her thought spoke aloud. "Were you ever in love, aunt?" she asked. Her aunt glanced up startled, and then sat very still, with hands that had ceased to work. "What makes you ask such a question, Vee?" she said. "I wondered." Her aunt answered in a low voice: "I was engaged to him, dear, for seven years, and then he died." Ann Veronica made a sympathetic little murmur. |
Who's On Your Reading List? Read Classic Books Online for Free at Page by Page Books.TM |
Ann Veronica H. G. [Herbert George] Wells |
Home | More Books | About Us | Copyright 2004