It is the hate that is the enemy. Not men. Hate does not die with killing. It only springs up a hundredfold. The only thing stronger than hate is love.
The girl looked about her. “’ Tis a pretty room,” she said without thinking, and then wondered how that could be, when it was so plain and bare. Perhaps it was only the sunlight on boards that were scrubbed smooth and white, or perhaps it was the feeling of peace that lay across the room as tangibly as the bar of sunshine.
A man’s first loyalty is to the soil he stands on.
She saw now that she could not tell him about the books she had loved any more than she could make him see the palm trees swaying under a brilliant blue sky.
Yes, I do think William is serious. But you don’t need to be worried, dear. No one is going to hurry you, least of all William himself. He is a very fine young man. Of course you feel like strangers now. But I think you’ll find sufficient to talk about before long.
If only I could be here alone, without Judith or anyone, she thought with longing. Someday I am going to come back to this place, when there is time just to stand still and look at it. How often she would come back she had no way of foreseeing, nor could she know that never, in the months to come, would the Meadows break the promise they held for her at this moment, a promise of peace and quietness and of comfort for a troubled heart.
Hannah’s magic cure for every ill,” Nat had said. “Blueberry cake and a kitten.” Kit smiled to see it working its charm on Prudence. But there was an invisible ingredient that made the cure unfailing. The Bible name for it was love.
Then, unbelievably, out of the mist came the miracle. First two points of mast, then sails, transparent and wraithlike in the fog, then, as Kit strained her eyes, the looming hull, the prow, and the curved tail of a fish. The Dolphin! Glory be to heaven! The most beautiful sight in the world! The Dolphin, moving down toward Wright’s Island on a steady breeze.
The one small room the house contained was scoured as a seashell. There was a table, a chest, a bedstead with a faded quilt, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. A few ancient kettles hung about the clean-swept hearth. From a square of sunlight on the floor an enormous yellow cat opened one eye to look at them.
Tis so beautiful – flowers every day of the year. You can always smell them in the air, even out to sea.
As Kit reached the part about the schoolmaster and his cane, to her amazement a rusty chuckle interrupted her. Hannah’s face had crumpled into a thousand gleeful wrinkles.
I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they’ve done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven’t they?
Because they have never tried to get to know her. People are afraid of things they don’t understand.
There was the Dolphin coming up the river with all her sails. The curving tail of the prow was chipped and dull, the hull was battered and knobby with barnacles, the canvas dark and weathered, yet how beautiful she was! In.
He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
Tell them the truth if you like,” responded Kit airily, knowing quite well that Judith, for all her disapproval, would never give her away. The common bond of just being young together in that household was strong enough for that.
A sudden joyful hope sprang into Mart’s mind.
He had envied Attean his free, unhampered life in the forest, and the boisterous comradeship in the village.
The man did not even hear her. His eyes had gone straight to Mercy where she sat by the hearth, and her own eyes stared back, enormous in her white face. Then with a hoarse, wordless sigh, John Holbrook stumbled across the room, and went down on his knees with his head in Mercy’s lap.
Beside the plain blue homespun and white linen which modestly clothed Aunt Rachel and Judith, Kit’s flowered silk gave her the look of some vivid tropical bird lighted by mistake on a strange shore.