Tamarisk Town (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919. Excerpt: ... jauntily offering-him a bunch of leaves in exchange for all that was real and solid and settled in his life. Already the vision at the Gringer was growing dim--or rather assuming a strange flatness, like some picture, apart from himself, a mere image of something that could scarcely be. Marlingate lay between him and the eastward cliffs, cutting him off with its dear substantiality from the land of illusion and spells. He must never go back there, where the woods met the sea. In spite of his civic honours and experience, he was still too young to venture unscathed into' Luthany. He remembered the tryst at the Slide. He must keep that, but only to destroy the rest. He would tell her all that he had found in his own heart, repeat to her the arguments that Marlingate had used against her. With his queer ignorance of woman, which no intercourse with women seemed able to dispel, he expected her to follow his reasoning and come to his conclusions. Anyhow, she was going to Scotland in a day or two. It was only a question of resisting her now. Soon half the kingdom would divide them, and when she came back she would have forgotten, and he would be safe. He probably would not see her again till October, and by then the spell would have vanished. It was fading now--only a faint memory seemed to linger, like spindrift on the air. 13 The Slide was an old smugglers' haunt like French Landing, and the first of those valleys that scoop the cliffs between Marlingate and the Stussels, where the high ground crumbles slowly into Romney Marsh. There was a little wood, as at French Landing, and a sea-goinpf stream, but the hollow lay cracked wide open to the Channel, and the salt winds plunged up it, twisting the oaks, which the brined fogs had dwarfed, so that with th...