Page:Magdalen by J S Machar.pdf/142

 knitting needles, Over the broad nose of her ruddy face, thick eyeglasses were saddled, and under the glasses two grey eyes flitted about like two drops of mercury. She watched the common to the right and to the left, up and down, and nothing escaped her: no man, no beast, no sheet of paper carried by the wind, no window facing the common, no dormer window on the roofs

That aged widow, whose husband, a presiding alderman, had been killed in the autumn by an awkward hunter who emptied a full charge into his abdomen, had a daughter whom thirty summers were making as bitteras meadow-saffron. A modest income from the house and the fields barely permitted them to lead an existence proper for patrician women, and thus life enraged them against their own fate, and filled them with hatred for the whole human race. Like that Merlin of old, of whom the Romanticists sing, the widow passed her days at the window, where with her quick glance she