An Echo of Passion (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

an excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter: In the midst of the stilly afternoon, Benjamin Fenn, lying on the grassy side of a hill at Tanford, looking over a low stone wall through the gap between a clump of light leaved ash-trees and an oak which had gathered in its arms the shade of two centuries, gazed at a distant, mist-like sheet of water resting in the wooded hollow far below. Its mild, humid sparkle was like a memory hidden away from the contact of every-day life, — a place in the past, where once he might have bathed his heart in a pleasant coolness, but which the dense growth of years had since concealed. " It is strange," he said to his wife, " how that little Swallow Pond makes me think of the past, and yet I never saw it before." In fact, they had but just come to Tanford, to spend the first vacation which the young chemist, employed by a large manufacturing house, had allowed himself since his marriage, five years before. " I know what you mean," said she, looking up from her novel. She was nestled prettily on a traveling rug nearer the wall, with one of the lowest oak boughs darting out above and stretching its sharp-outlined leaves like a little roof above her pale golden head, — a sort of votive image, placed there for her husband to worship. " I have those sensations myself, sometimes, and I don't know what to make of them. How do you explain it, Ben ? Is n't there something chemical, or physi— physiological about it, or something of that kind ? " A little bird in the neighboring birch-wood gave a loud, bright, astonished whistle at this question, and Mrs. Ethel's husband laughed under his mild reddish beard. " There's more or less chemistry in everything," he answered, "and there 's a little of nearly everything in chemistry. But I 'm afraid it does n't account for this." In his secret mind, his mood was by no means a laughing one. Had his wife, he asked himself, ever really experienced the sensation he had just felt ? Hardly possible. Had she the least idea what he was thinking about ? Equally impossible. Finally, would he be willing to tell her ? To this question he conveniently deferred making any answer. He relapsed, instead, into the delicious dreaming quietude of a few minutes before, — gazing off again at the glimmer of Swallow Pond, with the rough blue mountains beyond ; at the clouds which were lazily pulling themselves to pieces in the clear, airy blue above ; at the sweet, fresh quiet of the solitary region that surrounded him. Now and then the definite but muffled sound of a woodsman's axe sent its regular " chock! — chock !" from some remote angle of the upland, ceasing again when the wielder rested his arm; and several times the rude tinkle of a cow-bell resounded along the shaven curve of the hill, from a pasture nearer the village. One of the cattle lowed. "Do you notice, Ethel," Fenn suddenly asked, "that a slight echo — or perhaps it is a resonance — of that cow's lowing reaches us with the sound, and almost before the direct sound-waves ?" She did not respond at once; and when she did so it was with a slightly injured tone. " No, I have n't," she said. " I 'm not trying to humbug you," her husband assured her. " It's a very curious fact, which I never happened to observe before. In fact, I would n't have believed it, if I had n't just heard it." " I suppose you mean I ought to have observed it," said the little saint under the oak-tree, not very sweetly. " Not at all," said Fenn, quickly. " I thought it would interest you." "Well, then," proceeded Ethel, with a light, saucy laugh, "tell the cow to tinkle or make some kind of noise again, and I 'll listen."