It was a rimy October
morning, and the sun rising slowly above the shadowy aspens in the
graveyard, shone dimly through the transparent silver veil that hung
over the landscape. The leaves, still russet and veined with purple on
the boughs overhead, lay in brown wind-rifts along the drive, where they
had been blown during the night before the changeful weather had settled
into a frosty stillness at daybreak.
"By Jove, it's these confounded acorns that keep me awake," thought Gay,
with a nervous irritation which was characteristic of him when he had
been disturbed. "A dozen ghosts couldn't have managed to make themselves
more of a nuisance."
Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion,
he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had
thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt,
somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with
his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a
hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter
of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but
a condemnation.
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