The shielding wing Author:Will Levington Comfort 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: Ill Ramarie's Change Archer had left at once. This was his second day in Trieste. He was waiting now for the Austrian woman, having seen her but a few minu... more »tes yesterday. The city itself had made him think much of Strauvin's Trieste — and the lips of Nador pursing for the passage of that rousing wordless theme, simple as a song from the soil and as perpetual in significance. The music meant the great calm of the revolutionary spirit to Archer now — the calm that can survey the steady stars from the banks of a bloody river. His own heart was in revolution. He saw all creatures as well as all nations at war, and he saw that war was but a precursor for a more cleansing strife. . . . The woman was slow to come. Archer, glancing through a few notes and field settings as he waited, came upon the brief description he had written of the action at the moment of sunset when Nador made his attempt toblow the core out of Manataneff's position. He crumpled the paper in his hand, and ordered a second pot of coffee — not because the first was finished, but because the first was cold. Archer sat alone near the escarpment on the great white cliff in a little stone cafe in what had possibly been a lodge-keeper's house of the Chateau Miramar. Twenty people would have crowded the lodge itself, but there were a hundred tables in the gardens where the ancient laurels grew in boxes, the bay-leafed rhododendrons — bay leaves for Trieste's hair, Archer thought whimsically. It was enough that they made coffee in the little stone lodge — coffee such as he had tasted only once before, and that was in a hotel of Boston. Two Austrian officers on sick leave, with four rather adoring young women, disturbed the starry quiet that Archer had enjoyed. It was not their fatuousness, even their patriotism...« less