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With harp and crown, by the authors of 'Ready-money Mortiboy'.
With harp and crown by the authors of 'Readymoney Mortiboy' Author:Walter Besant 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 V. jjARION turned idly over the sketches her new patron had left with her. There were some fifty or more water- colours, executed with great power of ... more »drawing and considerable feeling for colour. But they were nearly all alike. They represented the Hermit in his youth — the likeness was quite unmistakable — in various scenes connected with the army. He was riding a race; he was presiding at a convivial gathering; he was acting on a stage; he was dancing; he was fighting; but none of the portraits seemed so exactly characteristic as the one which he had snatched from her hand, showing himself — his own actual face — wild with terror amid those dismal surroundings of cold, misery, and death. Why should a man paint himself deliberately as a coward? Men, however, as Marion might have known, do reveal their own natures who get to giving secrets to paper. There was a murderer, some time ago, who came home after perpetrating the deed, and wrote on a slip of paper, by way of rough note for after-entry in a diary, a memorial of his own crime: "Fine and hot; killed a little girl"—a circumstance which, if I remember right, so far prejudiced the mob against him, that they wished then and there to rend him into small pieces. But Marion was no psychologist; she had never learned to reason and to analyze, as lawyers say-—which is, being interpreted into English, to impute the worst motives, and then to try and prove them. Therefore, she wondered. Presently, turning over the drawings, she came to a head. There was nothing very much, artistically speaking, to attract her attention. The head was dressed in the fashion of hair common twenty-five years ago—not a very pretty fashion. It was not well painted—not nearly so well as the later sketches. But Marion looked at it with an aston...« less