The Alabaster Box Author:Walter Besant General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1900 Original Publisher: Dodd, Meade 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 you can sel... more »ect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHILDE ROBERT GERALD left the hall and strolled about the common rooms. They were deserted. In the library? however, he found the young man they called Childe Robert. He was sitting in a wooden chair, a high-backed carved chair with something of an ecclesiastical air, although it was quite new, and the work of the Settlement classes in carving and cabinet work. The chair was placed in the square window; the occupant was reading, his head bent over his book. It must be confessed that the affectation of saintliness, whether conveyed by the carriage, the voice, the face, the eyes, may be intolerably offensive. Gerald conceived a strong distrust of this young man on account of what seemed to him these external claims to saintliness. His hair was fair and parted at the side, disclosing a high narrow forehead ; his face was smooth and of an oval rapidly narrowing to the pointedchin ; his thin lips were parted as he read; his eyes, as he turned at the opening of the door, were limpid and lustrous ; his fingers were long and thin ; his figure, rather over the middle height, was so thin as to seem fragile. He just looked round, raised his eyes for a moment when the door opened, dropped them again, and went on with his reading. To Gerald it seemed as if he was affecting absorption in his book. The sun fell upon his head, the yellow sun of October, upon that fair hair, and turned it into a kind of glory. To Gerald this seemed as if he was posing consciously in the sunshine. He stood watching him with increasing wrath. What did the fellow mean by putting on, for his benefit, that...« less