Within the Precincts - 1 Author:Mrs. Oliphant Volume: 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1879 Original Publisher: B. Tauchnitz Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary History / General Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has n... more »o 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 select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER XXIV. A CRISIS. When Lottie got up next morning the world seemed to have changed to her. It had changed a little in reality, as sometimes one day differs from another in. autumn, the world having visibly made a more marked revolution than usual in a single night. It had got on to the end of August, and there were traces of many fiery fingers upon the leaves on the Slopes. It had been a very fine summer, but it was coming prematurely to an end, everybody said, and about the horizon there began to be veils of luminous mist in the morning, and soft haze that veiled the evening light. This autumnal aspect of the world seemed to have come on in that one night. The Virginian creeper round the window had "turned" in several patches of scarlet and yellow all at once. It was beautiful, but it was the first step towards winter and the. chills -- the first evidence of a year decaying which makes the spectator pause and think. When Lottie woke she felt in her heart that consciousness of something, she knew not what, something that had happened to her, that overshadowed her, and forced itself upon her before shecould tell what it was, which is the way care manifests itself at our bedsides: something that made her heart heavy the first thing on awaking. Then she remembered what it was. Lottie, we have said, was not a girl who was in the habit of taking advice; but for that once she had taken it, seizing upon the ...« less