North Face Read Online Free PDF

the rest.
    Miss Searle too, after her fashion, had been traversing a gap of understanding in the opposite direction. There was a hesitant little pause; neither succeeded in expressing what she felt.
    Miss Fisher said, at length, “It must be nice, being able to read it straight off. It looks just like a foreign language, to me.”
    “It’s so much a matter of the spelling. If you heard it read—but I’m keeping you.”
    “No, do read me a bit, if your throat’s not too sore.”
    “Thank you, it’s past that stage. But I’m afraid I shan’t do it justice.” On an impulse, she put aside the Tales (so often ruined for the half-educated by popular renderings) and picked up the Minor Poems from the bedside table. Something short and self-contained. A little concession to modern pronunciation would, she thought, in this instance be justifiable.
    Miss Fisher listened languidly, content to have extended her olive-branch. It was the Balade de Bon Conseil. The opening seemed to her rather sententious. The even voice read on, with the slight increase of power which Miss Searle had kept in reserve.
    “That thee is sent, receive in buxomness,
    The wrestling for this world asketh a fall.
    Here is no home, here is but wilderness:
    Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast, out of thy stall!
    Know thy countree, look up, thank God of all:
    Hold the high way, and let thy ghost thee lead,
    And truth thee shall deliver, it is no drede.”
    Taking Miss Fisher by surprise, a prickling made itself felt in the back of her neck, and a shiver in her throat. She blinked. The next verse was a short one; the poem was finished. She swallowed hard.
    “Ta,” she said. “That was ever so nice. I hope your voice isn’t tired.”
    “Not at all. Do borrow the book at any time, if you’d care to.”
    “Thanks ever so.”
    “When this wretched cold of mine is a little better, perhaps we might go exploring together one day, if you’re free.”
    “I’d love to. We might go along to the coach-office and see if they’ve any good trips.”
    As in many chemical reactions, while the precipitates settled quietly at the bottom of the vessel, the reagent, with a different specific gravity, floated at the top. It was falling dusk; a light defined the lancet windows of the tower. Having decided that he could not face any more civilized conversation today, Neil Langton prepared to slip out quietly for an early dinner somewhere, and get to bed.

2 Weather Report
    L ATE SUN SLANTED ALONG the bracken, throwing every clump and curve into relief; deeply luminous towards the west, to the east richly shadowed; on the grand scale, the hills repeated the theme. Far ahead, beyond the thickly wooded cliffs which hid the shore, the sea lay in tiny glittering pleats. Every pebble and rut on the track seemed to yield up, under the loving exploration of the light, a separate rejoicing personality.
    Neil’s shadow, grotesquely lengthened, shot obliquely before him, playing in a spirit of good-humoured caricature with the limp from his blistered heel. Either his sock must be through, or he had darned it in hurry; he must really get himself out of this. The pain should have offered a kind of distraction, but he was worried lest he should be too lame to walk tomorrow. “Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.” The second alternative still remained an aspiration.
    The lit bracken shivered, subtly, in a light breeze; a dark cloud-shadow caressed a hill in passing. Conversations were going on everywhere, in which once he had been included. It was foolish, he supposed, not to have been prepared for this destruction along with the rest. He should be grateful, perhaps, for the illusion that such things would remain; it had kept him alive for the first few weeks, till living had established itself as a habit. Besides, what was happening now would have happened anyway, he supposed, in another twenty years, though imperceptibly then, like the stiffening of muscles