Philippa allowed polite regret to inform every muscle. ‘Whatever day it occurs,’ she said, ‘I feel I have a previous engagement.’‘May I congratulate you,’ he said agreeably, ‘on your evident popularit...
Our motive in locking it, if it matters, was to spare you the embarrassment of an interruption. Unless the comte de Sevigny of today is really so different from the Master of Culter of ten years ago?’...
Now his response was merely to detach himself from personal contact. Looking back, she could not remember a conversation veering on the intimate from which he had not withdrawn immediately. He had had...
No. I won’t. I won’t bend my knee, or kiss your charming shoes either. I may possibly fall flat on my face, but that will be quite inadvertent.
How nice, said Lymond, to have simple emotions. No trouble with principles; no independence of thought; no resistance to suggestion; no nonsense about adult behaviour when it comes to one’s own amour...
How many years hast thou, Hâkim?’Francis Crawford’s real age. Something the Dame de Doubtance had known and the girl Marthe had not. Something which, building up mastery over a strong and heterogeneou...
He remembered that clear, icy journey to Lampozhnya, and the sledges arching and hissing across the glittering axle tree of world.For a few days, what he had felt was pure happiness. And what Lymond h...
He received another kiss which led him to wonder, hopefully, if the English bastard at the Hôtel d’Hercule was dying.
From the door, he glanced back, once, at the unresponsive wreck of the room. ‘Then God damn your soul!’ he said, and walked out.
Francis asked him to stand watch this evening on the Cessford road, and he’s very anxious to save Francis from sin.’‘A risk which does not unduly trouble M. Crawford himself,’ said the Chevalier point...
Elephants gave you less bother, any day.
Do you think he will notice?’ Danny said. ‘I sometimes feel if I placed myself nude on the floor between the Voevoda and one of his meetings, he wouldn’t even walk round me.
Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you.On the tortoise-shell bed, his broth...
Boy,’ he said. ‘Listen to me, and learn the first lesson of man, the political animal. When you wage war, you wage it for ever. When war is over, it has never existed. There is a truce, and there will...
Because he knew … God, he knew! Jerott’s terrible romanticism, which would taste death so readily; so splendidly offer the blood of his fellows, in defence of the weak and the puny.
At pointblank range, there was no possibility of missing. He aimed into the fair, weary, rancourless face, and then at the heart, and both balls found their mark and brought death in the end, not with...
As a man, this child would be one’s offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living gras...
Alec Guthrie looked into the domineering, incongruous eyes which showed something of impatience and something of regret and something, blatant and wounding, of sharp self-derision.‘Abandon your quest,...
You are the only person with a shaky interest in ethics and the emotional stability of a quince seed in a cup of lukewarm water.....
For him, the gateway had opened, and the loss was hers to bear: that at least she could do, and honour his teaching. She could remember what he was and what had died with him: all the virtues and vice...