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Bagnold, Enid, 1889-1981

"The Happy Foreigner"


"_Do you know_...?"
"_No one knows_!"
"Oh ... oh...." All her high nerves came scudding and shuddering down
into the meadows of content. Eternal luck.... She crept under Stewart's
eiderdown and shivered.
"Here's the chocolate. I will boil it again on my cooker. Oh, you have
a sort of ague...."
Good friend ... kind friend! She had pictured her like that, anxious,
unquestioning and warm!
Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon
the Guardians of the Honour.
As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes
of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a
gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud
from her hands, her feet.
"Had your breakfast?" said some one.
"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form
the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds
of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her.
Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third
breakfast.


CHAPTER XV

ALLIES
A thaw set in.
All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks,
sank into the ground.


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