"Half-light" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... last tiny red tongue of the fire. The men stood about in awkward silence, panting with heat and weariness. Sir Redmond was ostentatiously filling his pipe. Beatrice knew him by his straight, soldierly pose. In the drab half-light they were all mere black outlines of men, and, for the most part, she could not distinguish one from another. Keith Cameron she knew; instinctively by his slim height, and by the way he carried his head. Unconsciously, she leaned down from ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... the top bar of the gate, her figure enveloped in her long coat, and her white tam a bright spot in the half-light. ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... it. I—" He ended abruptly and thrust his head into the car, his eyes questing hers in the half-light; the chauffeur with his engine going ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... behind his fortifications of reserve, he was able to maintain just the right shade of dignity, when, in the half-light of the midwinter afternoon, Diane glided into the big, book-lined apartment, in which the comfortable air induced through long occupancy by people of means did not banish a certain sombreness. She entered with the ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... he walked, followed always closely by Rip, and saw the tall iron gates of the Park, Apsley House, the long line of Piccadilly, all uncertain, gentle, reduced to a whimsical mildness of aspect in the half-light of the dawning, he again recalled the fact, which he had mentioned that night to Doctor Levillier, of people watching an invalid who had seen, at the precise moment of dissolution, the soul escaping furtively from its fleshy prison ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... herd of goats that had scampered away into the darkness recovered from their panic and came slowly back one by one, to form a circle round the fire, where they stood, long-horned, shaggy, and full-bearded, looking in the half-light like so many satyrs of the classic times, blinking their eyes and watching the little feast as if awaiting their time to be ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... investigate light and shade in their various intricate relations, it may be proper to notice a few of the more palpable and self-evident combinations; and for the better comprehending of which I shall divide them into five parts, viz.: Light, half-light, middle tint, half-dark and dark. When a picture is chiefly composed of light and half-light, the darks will have more force and point, but without the help of strong color to give it solidity it will be apt to look feeble, and when a picture ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... more and more swamps and surface water. Time after time our ponies mired and had to be lifted out of the mud. Lush ferns and rank grass made walking dangerous. The trees were interlaced with draping festoons of gray "Spanish moss," forming a canopy overhead which let through only a gloomy half-light. No sounds broke the stillness except the half-awed calls of the men. No birds, not even a squirrel. Then it ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... three-quarter sort of a moon was sinking in the west, and the bark branches of the trees stood out blackly in the half-light. ...
— Marjorie's New Friend • Carolyn Wells
... green as I looked at it. As the train moved on with increasing speed, the detective counted the carriages, and noted down the number. It was now dark, with the thin crescent of the moon hanging in the western sky throwing a weird half-light on the shining metals. The rear lamps of the train disappeared around a curve, and the signal stood at baleful red again. The black magic of the lonesome night in that strange place impressed me, but the detective was a most practical man. He placed ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... had seen it one morning, dazzling and bathed in tears, while she embraced him with her whole soul. And that alone now remained; his years of religious study with their monotonous lessons, their ever similar exercises and ceremonies, had flown away into the same haze, into a vague half-light, full ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... it. He reached them as they stood about the little porch of the house, packed closely around Barney and Sam, who said nothing, but followed Barney like his shadow. If the sun had been shining, it might not have happened as it did; but there was a semi-obscurity, a weird half-light shed by the thick sky and falling snow, which somehow encouraged the enraged ruffians, who pounded on the door just as the pleading voice of the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... moment Captain Severi was descending the short flight of stone steps to meet her. He was not very like Giovanni, but in the half-light the Princess saw a resemblance that made her start. Ugo was less energetically built, but he wore his uniform well and there was much in his gait and the outline of his figure that recalled ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... cliff face, nor did another hairy body protrude from any of the numerous cave mouths from the high-flung abode of the chief to the habitations of the more lowly members of the tribe nearer the cliff's base. Then he moved outward upon the sheer face of the white chalk wall. In the half-light of the baby moon it appeared that the heavy, shaggy black figure moved across the face of the perpendicular wall in some miraculous manner, but closer examination would have revealed stout pegs, as large around as a man's ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and waistcoat, descended the ladder into the presence of a roaring fire. He shot a glance at the closed bedroom door, and then hastily made his way out of the cabin and around to the well. Eliza was preparing breakfast. In the grey half-light he made out Striker and Zachariah moving about the barnlot. A rough but clean towel hung across the board wall of the well, while a fresh bucket of water stood on the shelf inside, its chain hanging limply from the towering ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Church is a spectacle like another. There are chants, music, tapers, perfumes, flowers, the half-light which comes ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... time that people of the forest had paused on the hill at twilight to look down on Bradleyburg. The sight always seemed to intrigue and mystify the wild folk,—the shadowed street, the spire of the moldering church ghostly in the half-light, the long row of unpainted shacks, and the dim, pale gleam of an occasional lighted window. The old bull moose, in rutting days, was wont to pause and call, listen an instant for such answer as the twilight city might ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... the previous hour or two of tensity, it was a relief to be face to face with my man, I able to read his, if I could, he able to read mine. It was only in the grey half-light of his hole in the rocks, but, at least, we should look each other in the eyes, as men wish to do when they are acting honestly towards each other, even if later ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... sufficiently uneasy about her to be always at her bedside. Usually the sick girl stayed alone, with her window-curtains closed, lying there in the soft half-light that was soothing to her nerves. The silence was broken at intervals by the voice of Modeste, who would come and offer her her medicine. When Jacqueline had taken it, she would shut her eyes, and resume, half asleep, her sad reflections. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... It is not my fault!" these grown-up children groaned. All through the five acts, which took place in a perpetual half-light—forests, caves, cellars, death-chambers—little sea-birds struggled: hardly even that. Poor little birds! Pretty birds, soft, pretty birds.... They were so afraid of too much light, of the brutality of deeds, words, passions—life! Life ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... lost to herself the whole day-through, and now she possessed herself again. She grew quiet and silent, and even solemn. But Pete rattled on with cheerful talk about the day's doings. At the doors of the houses on the road as they passed, people were standing in the half-light to wave them salutations, and Pete sent back his answers in shouts and laughter. Turning the bridge they saw a little group at the porch of ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Donovan, as the subject of his comment receded into the hazy half-light of the plain, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... hand and looked down at her, framing a commonplace reply. But for some reason the words lay unspoken upon his tongue. Alaire's informal greeting, her parted lips, the welcoming light in her eyes, had sent them flying. It seemed to him that the dim half-light which illumined this nook emanated from her face and her person, that the fragrance which came to his nostrils was the perfume of her breath, and at the prompting of these thoughts all his smothered longings rose as if at a signal. As mutinous ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... her seat. He beckoned to her, and she continued to move, crossing the shady room, pure and bright in her white dress, her hair loose, with something of a sleep-walker in her unhurried motion, in her extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in the half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face before. It had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like sternness. Arrested in the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed to wake up, flushed faintly—and this flush, passing off, carried away with it the strange ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... assembled at it, were beginning dessert, and consequently had reached the gayest moment of the repast. Moreover, the hall was so large that the lamps and candles which lighted it, multiplied as they were, left in the most favourable half-light both sides of the apartment, in which fifteen or twenty servants were coming and going. The queen and Mary Seyton mingled with this crowd, which was too much occupied to notice them, and without stopping, without slackening, without looking back, they ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... plainly in the flickering light: a rough, wholesome face it was, refined by death, yet unshaven and unkempt, too. Here was work for Voban's shears and razor. Presently there was a footstep behind me, and, turning, I saw in the half-light ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... talking about. I don't know and I don't care." And then confronting her, their faces not a foot apart, for by now she had got to her feet, his hands gripped together and shaking, his teeth clenched, his eyes glowing there in the half-light of the auditorium, almost like an animal's, he demanded, "Can't you see what's the matter with me? Haven't you seen it ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... work which was a mere matter of strength—and they touched her fancy. Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy—a pale, sombre half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blastman seen through a narrow window in some basement where iron was being melted, a bench-worker ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... down into the half-light of the street. Georgiev, behind her, watched her, breathless, expectant. Harmony ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... extended upward for perhaps fifty feet, then it shaded into red. The farmer noticed, too, that the fire did not leap and dance with flames, but seemed rather to glow—a steady light like the burning of colored powder. In the morning half-light it threw a weird, unearthly reddish-green ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... streaking the sky with pink and salmon tints, and, although her eyes were gazing into it, her thoughts reached far beyond. Standing upon the hilltop, her hands crossed over the red emblem on her breast, the half-light of soft color touching her immobile face, she typified the Spirit of Mercy poised above the unawakened battlefield, ready at the first gun's crash to fly downward with her warmth, ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... until in the dim light of a certain landing they beheld a slim figure bowed upon its knees in an agony of abasement before a scarred and dingy door. Even as they stared, the slender, girlish figure sobbed again, and, with a sudden, yearning gesture, lifted a face, pale in the half-light, and kissed that battered door; thereafter, weeping still, she rose to her feet and turned, but seeing Spike, stood very still all at once and with hands clasped ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... by our experience then and there. For, scarcely had we done with supper,—and by this time the gloom had grown to darkness, and the half-light of evening held the landscape,—when out of the semi-gloom there came a call,—the call of a man hailing a camp. Indeed, we were not sure he had not hailed several times before we heard him; for, to tell the truth, we were ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... are needed to make a common foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... portraits to right and left of her loomed vaguely through the half-light. She glanced at each one as she passed slowly along, with the feeling that she was taking leave of them forever. In this way her gaze had been diverted from the direction of her own portrait, and she was within a few yards of it when, looking straight ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... half-light of the coming day he looked supernatural—a strange spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth. This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic blood tingling ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... Friday, July 21, we were within a hundred miles of the island, and we encountered the ice in the half-light. I waited for the full day and then tried to push through. The little craft was tossing in the heavy swell, and before she had been in the pack for ten minutes she came down on a cake of ice and broke the bobstay. Then the water- inlet of the motor choked with ice. The schooner was tossing like ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... with the last word, to the shelf where lay his racing mask and gauntlets. The melancholy drip from moist eaves and trees, the dreary half-light and heavy air had absolutely no depressing power upon his flawless nerves and vigor of life. By the open door he paused to look out, unconsciously clasping his hands behind his head with the leisurely grace and relaxation of one who ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... Odin learned, were about sixteen hours long on this dying planet. It was toward midnight when they started out from the ship toward the violet dome. The strange half-light still hovered over the ground. In the sky, splinters of mauve tore at curtains of purplish flame. Something like northern lights, they glinted and gleamed, wrestled and writhed. There was no peace up there in that abandoned sky. ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... a great hand to make a poor mouth. Wa'n't she from somewheres up Parsley way?" whispered Miss Rebecca, as they stumbled in the half-light. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... room, where the brass of the pretty Meusian beds and the carved wood of the cupboards shine in the half-light. All these things have suffered through the rough use the soldiers put them to, but we have real comfort here. We have found table-implements and a dinner-service, and for two days running we made ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... spotless and the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... and hurried through the dark streets to Skobeliev Square. In all the great city not a human being could be seen; but there was a faint sound of stirring, far and near, like a deep wind coming. In the pale half-light a little group of men and women were gathered before the Soviet headquarters, with a sheaf of gold-lettered red banners-the Central Executive Committee of the Moscow Soviets. It grew light. From afar the vague stirring sound deepened and became louder, ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... In the half-light jean beheld a lady so different from all he had ever set eyes on till that moment that he could form no notion of what she was, no idea of her beauty or her age. Never had he seen eyes that flashed so vividly ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... time he sat in a corner, recalling what Alice had said in England and how she had looked. He pictured her standing in the dark-paneled library at the Garth, with eyes that sparkled as she spoke in his defense, sitting with a smile in the half-light by the big hearth in the hall, and waiting for him in the orchard. She moved through all the scenes with the same calm grace; even in her anger—and he had seen her angry—there was a proud reserve. But Alice stood above all other women; there ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... Hollowed in smooth hard brightness, now dissolved To infinite soft depth, and smoulder'd down Low as the roofs, dark burning blue, and soared Clear to that winking drop of liquid silver, The first exquisite star. Now the half-light Tidied away the dusty litter parching Among the cobbles, veiled in the colour of distance Shabby slates and brickwork mouldering, turn'd The hunchback houses into patient things Resting; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... ran the November Elections: to the joy of most citizens; nay the very Court supported Petion rather than Lafayette. And so Bailly and his Feuillants, long waning like the Moon, had to withdraw then, making some sorrowful obeisance, into extinction;—or indeed into worse, into lurid half-light, grimmed by the shadow of that Red Flag of theirs, and bitter memory of the Champ-de-Mars. How swift is the progress of things and men! Not now does Lafayette, as on that Federation-day, when his noon was, 'press his sword firmly on the Fatherland's Altar,' and swear in sight of France: ah ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... bold relief against the clear azure of the firmament, while large masses of thick, strong fibrous shoots forced their way through the chasm, and hung floating to and fro, like so many waving strings. The person whose mysterious arrival had attracted the attention of Franz stood in a kind of half-light, that rendered it impossible to distinguish his features, although his dress was easily made out. He wore a large brown mantle, one fold of which, thrown over his left shoulder, served likewise to mask the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Thou canst not lighten even with 'thy' light, All powerful in beauty as thou art. Almeida, it my heart were substanceless, Then might thy rays pass thro' to the other side, So swiftly, that they nowhere would abide, But lose themselves in utter emptiness. Half-light, half-shadow, let my spirit sleep; They never learnt to love who never knew ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... doors of the hall had rattled to, leaving him alone half will- less. He started and then returned to the balcony over the fondamenta. In the half-light he could see her stepping into a waiting gondola, and certain words came floating up clearly ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... and across to the house. Pete undressed and turned in, to dream of who knows what ghostly lions prowling through the timberlands of the Blue Range. It seemed but a few minutes when he heard the clatter of the pack-horse bell that Mrs. Bailey used to call the men to breakfast. The chill gray half-light of early morning discovered him with one cautious eye, gazing across at Haskins, who still snored, despite the bell. "Oh, Bill!" called Pete. Haskins's snore broke in two as he swallowed the unlaunched half and sat up rubbing his eyes. He swung his feet down and yawned prodigiously. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... discovery. A dark mass, like some prehistoric monster, was gradually approaching. Tim spoke to a man next to him who was softly swearing and bandaging a shattered hand. He peered through the light and half-light of dawn, and then started to laugh in a nervous way. "Hell, mate;" he said, "the whole German race are advancing against us; it's all up with us. Look, they are coming on like a solid wall ... springing out of the earth just solid ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... started with an intense artillery bombardment from every gun in the salient, and it was an inspiring sight to stand on the ridge behind "50" trench and watch, through the half-light, the line of flashes to the west, an occasional glare showing us the towers of Ypres over the trees. The Germans replied at once on "A1" trench, but finding that we remained quiet, their batteries ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... as in Scene Two, but after the destruction. The half-light of a moon partially veiled by clouds. In the obscurity there can be seen carts, mules, groups of those ready to depart. Voices are heard of persons calling one another and checking their numbers. The people are confused and leaderless. ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... abusive words, like fresh young corn beneath a hail storm. Rhodopis was left standing alone in the empty, brightly decorated (supper-room). Knakias extinguished the colored lamps on the walls, and a dull, mysterious half-light took the place of their brilliant rays, falling scantily and gloomily on the piled-up plates and dishes, the remnants of the meal, and the seats and cushions, pushed out of their places by the retiring ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sent him off, and remained on the bench alone. The heat had yet increased, and the distant hills were burning in the furnace-like glow of the sun. However, he lingered there forgetfully, dreaming in the greeny half-light amidst the foliage, and listening to the continuous murmur of the Gave, as if a voice, a dear voice from the realms beyond, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... comprehend all this? Do they understand that the heart requires gradual changes, and that if a half-light awakens, a noon-day blaze dazzles and burns? It is not that the poor child, who is trembling in a corner, refuses to learn; far from that, she has aptitude, good-will, and a quick and ready intelligence; she knows she has reached the age at which it is ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... more likely than that Matilda, in her amazement, should reveal the house's secret? But the half-light of the room was a very obliging ally against such ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... lost in revery. She, following his mood, spoke less and less; and when Jane returned, late at night, escorted by a tall, bronzed young ranchman, she found them sitting in silence in a half-light, staring into the late ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... nearer, he saw that the lights seemed to be fluorescents. They were coming from corrugated iron sheds that looked like aircraft hangars strung together. There was a woven-wire fence around the structures, and a sign that said simply: Project Eighty-Five. In the half-light from the sky, he could see a well-kept lawn, and there were a few groups of men standing about idly. Most wore white coveralls, though two were ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... was lit by four naked candles. Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains, revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out life, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the shore beyond were both very flat in that part; nothing but marshy land, overgrown with tussock-grass, and a few sand-dunes, covered with bents. It was not a country which could give much cover to an enemy; but in that half-light one could not distinguish very clearly, and an enemy could therefore take ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... heart bids me. And where it bids, I care not for conventions or consequences!" He flung his hand out with a splendid gesture, his head high, his eyes lustrous in the half-light of the cell. "Where it leads, I have to follow. That is why I am a Socialist! That is why I am here, today, outcast and execrated, a prisoner, in danger of long years of living death in the pestilential tomb of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... among the great piles of stores, the mules and water-carts crunching along the gravel, the wounded waiting embarkation—Mac saw what might be called the throbbing heart of Anzac. It throbbed, for the most part, in darkness; but, here and there, caught in the half-light from lamps among tiered piles of boxes, he had odd glimpses of the splendid fellows as they went about their work; and he was thrilled by the grandeur and manhood of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed, after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when one can almost hear the music ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... dull half-light of the corridor lay a woman, most superbly formed. She was dark, and the thick masses of her hair, ready for the hairdresser, fell in a tangle over her beautifully chiselled features and full, rounded shoulders and neck. A scarlet bathrobe, loosened at the throat, actually ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... stands the U. C. fullback, grimly waiting. The two collide, and the chasing halfback gains; but the Berkeley back drops to the tackle a fraction of an instant too late and runs fair against a straight-arm. Tom Ashley, with the ball clutched tight against his breast, his set face gleaming white in the half-light, sprints down the long barred space toward victory, keeping the distance between himself and the straining pack, running as only one man has ever ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... half-light of the clouded moon, Dagobert and his son perceived round them a V-shaped grove of tall trees, at which several paths met. Uncertain which to choose, Agricola said to his father: "Let us take the path that runs alongside the wall. It will surely ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... a handkerchief on the point of his sword. Jack could barely make it out in the half-light. At the same moment the officer commanding the Germans opposing ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... the task in hand, and when it was done, and a few more words had been said, they turned to the pallets which Davie had spread on either side of the hearth. The moon and the low fire made a strange half-light in the room. The two lay still, addressed to sleep. They ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... are dark churches, with massive, tall pillars; the light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The air is heavy with incense, and women in mantillas kneel in the half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... perhaps less fond of the scapegrace nephew than was her husband, and she felt the matter chiefly as it affected him, so that she heard with more equanimity than he had done; and as they sat round the fire in the half-light, for which Anne was thankful, the Doctor gave ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of themselves, as indeed the history of the past few years and the character of the population of the States at that time indicated that they could. He attended regularly all the sessions, and gave his opinions freely; but they are only dimly revealed in the half-light which enfolds in such lamentable obscurity the debates of that interesting body. What little is known can be ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... straight over my head. We ran downstairs together, pulling, pushing and imploring each other in the name of honor, duty and heaven to let him—let her—go out first through the bright hall door. Kendall was not in sight, but in a dim half-light a few yards off we saw Oliver. He was afoot, bending low, and gliding toward us with his revolver in his left hand. He fired as I did; her clutch spoiled my aim; with eager eyes she straightened to her finest height, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... half-light I furtively scan the set faces around me and find myself wondering what thoughts those impassive masks conceal. Are they counting the cost? Most of them have been through the ordeal before. Pale faces there are—small wonder when one thinks of what lies before them. Here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... happy accidents of place and circumstance accompanying such pleasure, are a noteworthy part of the interest of our experience. It was, as it happens, in a cheerful bow-window in the Oxford High Street that I read most of Balzac; read him in the dreamy half-light of late summer afternoons while the coming on of evening seemed delayed by something golden in the drowsy air which was more than the mere sinking of the sun behind ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... appearance was picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and creamy yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly effective as her manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face which was no longer young in such a way as to hide all the lines possible; while the half-light brought admirably out the rich dark smoothness of the tints, the black lustre of the eyes. A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed at first merely slow and languid, were in reality ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... A half-light broke through the network of boughs above them, flinging the ghost of a net about their feet; for they were mounting again to the faint luminosity of the naked night. Flambeau felt truth all round him as an atmosphere, but not as an idea. He answered with bewildered ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... 'There it is.' We went down into the basin to the edge of the water that lay there, black and still, Decros showing evident reluctance and restlessness the while, so strongly was his mind affected by all the stories he had heard about the pool. Moreover, it was rapidly growing dusk. In this half-light the funnel in which we were standing certainly did look a very diabolic and sinister hole. The fancy aiding, everything partook of the supernatural: the dark masses of brambles hanging from the rocks, the wild vines ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... from them between their legs. He regained the balcony and jumped from it as the others turned toward him. At least, it was so that Rouletabille believed he saw the mysterious struggle go in the half-light, amid most impressive silence, after that frightened cry of Natacha's. The whole affair had lasted only a few seconds, and the man was still hanging over the balcony, when from the bottom of the hall a new person sprang. It was ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... and hurried back to his room. Having opened and closed the door softly, he went to a chest of drawers near the window and fumbled in the half-light of the low-burning lamp. He slipped a small leather case into the breast pocket of his coat, and then stole back toward the door, as softly as before. With his hand on the knob, he paused and looked ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... applied to the glass with a clear white varnish, and when dry, a preparation is finally applied, which increases the transparency, and adds tenfold brilliancy to the effect. There is another design, printed in imitation of the half-light (abatiour;) this is used principally for a ground, covering the whole surface of the glass, within which (the necessary spaces having been previously cut out before it is stuck on the glass,) are placed medallion centres of Watteau figures, ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... certainly not an inspiring scene. The leaden skies, the heavy clouds, the dark land, and the gray-green of the sea, always shaded in perpetual half-light, lest the burning sun heat them beyond endurance. ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... sun was down, and they was just a kinda half-light on the mesquite, and the old man was on the east porch, smokin', and the boys was all lined up along the front of the bunk-house, clean outen sight of the far side of the yard, why I just sorta wandered over to the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... colleague exclaimed, says La Fayette: "I die for the sitting of the Jeu de Paume, and not for the fatal day at the Champ de Mars." I do not here intend to expound these mysterious words in the glimpses they give us by a half-light; but, whatever meaning we may attribute to them, it is evident that the sentiments and passions of the lower class have no share in them; it is a ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... In the intimate half-light of the summer-house, he loomed prodigiously big. He was gazing downward in careful consideration of three fat tortoise-shell pins and a surprising quantity of gold hair, which was practically all that he could see of Miss Hugonin's person; for that young lady had suddenly become ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... morning, the tanks were already lined up, sullen and menacing in the cold half-light. The men shivered in the biting air. One by one the crews entered the machines, and one by one the little steel doors closed behind them. The engines throbbed, ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... blinds. He made short and daring excursions in order to do this; but he was ever careful to leave his retreat open, in case he should have sudden need of it. Presently this lowering of the blinds had become a daily methodical exercise, and his rooms, when he had been his round, had the blood-red half-light of a ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... out of the room and was heard springing and jumping about, with yelps betokening joyful recognition of some one. Reassured by this, yet wishing to know more, Janice hurried into the hall. Coming from the half-light, it was too dark for her to distinguish anything, so she was forced to grope her way to the stairs; but other eyes were keener, and Janice, without warning, was encompassed by a man's arms, which drew her to him that his lips might press ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... it you, shipmate!" says he, drawing me out of the wind. "Look yonder, d'ye see aught of a rag o' sail, Martin?" Following his pointing finger, I stared away into the distance across a tumbling spume of waters vague in the half-light. "D'ye glimpse ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the chase. "His great delight . . . was to plunge into the darkening mere at eventide, his great head and heavy shoulders ruddy in the rays of the sun. Here he hissed and roared and spluttered, sometimes frightening the eel-catcher sailing home in the half-light, and remembering suddenly school legends of river-sprites and monsters ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... wanted. Checked by Fricka, he revokes his command to Brunnhilda, and goes off cursing fate. Siegmund and Sieglinda enter, flying before Hunding; Sieglinda faints, and at last sleeps; and then Brunnhilda steps forward from among the rocks in the gloomy half-light—a stern, imposing, indeed an awful, figure, the herald of death, seen only by warriors about to die. The Fate theme sounds from the orchestra, and another melody, out of which nearly the whole scene is woven, is heard, and then, to a simple chord—supernatural, ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the night before. He had a sense of intrusion—he felt that he was being tolerated. Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb. He noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely to the polished surface of the oak piano. A magazine sprawled face downward on the floor. Already the impress of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the summit of prosperity; that London was all banquets and carousals; that everybody was rich and enthusiastic, that the court was gallant, gay, and magnificent;—if by chance, far from these splendours, in some melancholy, indescribable half-light, like nightfall, that old man, clad in the same garb as the common people, was observed pale, absent-minded, bent towards the grave, standing on the shore of the lake, scarce heeding the storm and the winter, walking as though at random, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... remember, my first impression was so sweet that I could only sigh. A sort of smoky-grey, silvery-soft, half-light, half-mist, enveloped me on all sides. At first I made out nothing: I was dazzled by this azure brilliance; but little by little began to emerge the outlines of beautiful mountains and forests; a lake lay at my feet, with stars quivering in its depths, and the musical plash of waves. The fragrance ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... regarded him thoughtfully, through the half-light from the hall lamp. "I noticed you did a good deal of running, first and last," he observed. "I suppose you read before you ran—unless you have eyes in the back of your head. Well," he continued, "you can't make me believe that all girls are so anxious to make a good impression, or they wouldn't ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... inside appeared to be mostly desk. The gigantic slab of wood sat against the far wall of the room, in the right-hand corner and spreading over toward the center. It appeared, in the soft half-light of the room, to be waiting for somebody to walk into its lair. Malone was sure, at first sight, that this desk ate people; it was just the type: big and ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the doctor loved my sister through me—that I found some strange place in his great love for her, to which I had no title, but was most glad to have. For, then, in the sheltering half-light, he lifted me from my bed—crushed me against his breast—held me there, whispering messages I could not hear—and gently laid me down again, and went in haste away. And I dressed in haste: but fumbled at all the buttons, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... constant movement in the corridor and he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized everything that he trusted and believed in—a cool, dispassionate seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality. Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress. It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity. The nauseating sweetness that still lingered ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... was crowded, and I had perforce to sit on Annie's knees. This, with the jolting, the queer effect of the half-light in the rickety interior, together with the expression of the good people, who evidently could see no fun in rain, excited my risibility so strongly that I indulged in a smothered laugh, tempered to fit ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son's name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Knapfs' door-step. The short winter day was already drawing to its close. In the half-light Von Gerhard's ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... design, printed in imitation of the half-light (abat-jour); this is used principally for a ground, covering the whole surface of the glass, within which (the necessary spaces having been previously cut out before it is stuck on the glass) are placed medallion centres of Watteau figures, perfectly transparent, which ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... brightened; the room was filled with a faint, flickering light. Misty, vaporous, tormenting shadows danced and twisted oddly in the shifting glimmer: in the tenebrous half-light the occupants looked grey, weary, and haggard, their faces strangely distorted by the alternate rise and fall of the shadows. Arkhipov's bald head with its tightly stretched skin ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... muscle ready and even eager for use. His thirty years sat lightly upon him, though his dark hair was already slightly grey at the temples, for his great brown eyes were boyish and always would be. In the half-light, his clean-cut profile was outlined against the sky, and his mouth trembled perceptibly. He had neither the thin, colourless lips that would have made men distrust him, nor the thick lips that would have warned women to go slowly with him ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... frozen path. With the opening barn door there came a puff of warm animal breath. As the first rays of light entered, the stock stood up with many a sleepy groan, and bright eyes shining in the half-light swayed back and forth in the narrow stalls, while their owners waited patiently for the feed ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... half-light, was the face beneath the mass of gleaming black hair. And eyes! Dark, serious eyes, into which one might gaze far into mysterious depths—soft, restful eyes, thought the man as he stared upward into ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... and the startled Sarah at the same time, with one spring Blue Bonnet was at the window. What she saw there was hardly reassuring; the whole space between the house and the stables seemed to be filled with a howling, whirling mass of men. In the gray half-light of early dawn she could recognize no one. Suddenly a fresh explosion set the windows rattling; there was a hiss and a glare of red. In the glow she caught a glimpse of Alec; he held a revolver ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... the door and the sound of a key turned in the lock. KEITH enters. He stands a moment bewildered by the half-light, then calls sharply: "Larry!" and turns up the light. Seeing the forms on the couch, he recoils a moment. Then, glancing at the table and empty decanters, goes up to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... end of the path, sprang a furry gray creature, supple, fluffy, indescribably formless and immense in that deceptive half-light. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... with his smoking weapon. Then I was up, and, sword in hand, leapt towards his assailant, a tall, bearded man whose corselet flashed red in the fire-glow and who turned to meet my onset, shouting fiercely. And so we fell to it point and point; pushing desperately at each other in the half-light and raving pandemonium about us until more by good fortune than skill I ran him in the arm and shoulder, whereupon, gasping out hoarse maledictions, he incontinent made off into the dark. Then turned I to find myself alone; even the ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... no! I'm not cut, thanks!" Her eyes held a pained embarrassment. He caught the look, and her eyelids flickered and fell before his gaze, and then, as the footman repaired the damage, she sank back once more into the half-light beyond the radiance of the candles. "How shy she is!" thought Burnaby. "So many of these English women are. She's an important woman in her own right, too." He ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a hazy morning, which I thought betokened another hot day, and as I entered the "coffee-room" I found it to be pervaded by a curious half-light, not unlike that of summer twilight. The glow of the sun peering redly through the mist added warmth to this soft illumination, but since the room boasted only one small window it was badly ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... 1851 I went to dine every day at the Conciergerie with my two sons and my two imprisoned friends. These great hearts and great minds, Vacquerie, Meurice, Charles, and Francois Victor, attracted men of like quality. The livid half-light that crept in through latticed and barred windows disclosed a family circle at which there often assembled eloquent orators, among others Cremieux, and powerful and ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... she remembered that somebody had asked him to—perhaps herself. That was well; she needed to breathe, to summon strength and common-sense, find out what had been done, what reasonless madness she had committed in the half-light of the silver-stemmed trees clustering in ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything. His clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in the half-light, but one's imagination could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out ninepence on a carnation buttonhole. He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the world's lamenters ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... at once. He slipped on his clothes and went to the door. His eyes were used now to the dark, and there was a window that shed a half-light. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a familiar note in the weird cry, and almost mechanically Tarzan turned his head and answered. A moment later the tawny figure of Sheeta slunk out into the half-light of the beach. There was no moon, but the sky was brilliant with stars. Silently the savage brute came to the side of the man. It had been long since Tarzan had seen his old fighting companion, but the soft purr was sufficient ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the flycatcher family the Phoebe takes its food mostly flying. Mrs. Wright says that the Pewee in his primitive state haunts dim woods and running water, and that when domesticated he is a great bather, and may be seen in the half-light dashing in and out of the water as he makes trips to and from the nest. After the young are hatched both old and young disport themselves about the water until moulting time. She advises: "Do not let the Phoebes build under the hoods of your windows, for their spongy nests harbor innumerable ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... even as it clicked, a figure rose up from behind the rotting wherry and, as Mr. Chichester leaned towards Barnabas, smiling still but with eyes of deadly menace, a hand, pale and claw-like in the half-light, fell and clenched itself ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... man's look which makes a woman's heart beat faster, even if she is as inexperienced as Lydia. She was already tingling with an undefined emotion, and the shock of their meeting eyes made her face glow. It shone through the half-light as though a lamp had been ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... chamber was in darkness. I saw a man with long hair, a full beard, wild-looking eyes, a pale face, framed in large whiskers,—as well as I could distinguish, and, as I think—red in colour. I did not know the face. That was, in brief, the chief sensation I received from that face in the dim half-light in which I saw it. I did not know it—or, at least, I ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... the wilderness. Where the sun had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Stonor to the door. The long-drawn summer dusk of the North is an ever fresh wonder to newcomers. At sight of the exquisite half-light and the stars an exclamation of pleasure ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... Mr. Magee noisily attacked the fire. The blaze flared red on his strong humorous mouth, in his smiling eyes. Next, in the flickering half-light of suite seven, he distributed the contents of his traveling-bags about. On the table he placed a number of new ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... the dining-room, whose wide, half-closed shutters allow only a half-light to enter between the printed curtains. Rush-bottomed chairs, a great table, about which seven persons daily take their places, a few poor pieces of furniture, and a simple bookcase; such are all the contents. On the mantel, a clock in black marble, a precious ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... a ghostly image, in the soft and tender light of the great autumn moon as it lay against the paper doors and filled the tiny room. Through the half-light Yuki San saw many touches of the late inmate's personality. A discarded tie hung limply from a hook on the wall, a half-smoked cigar and a faded white rose lay side by side on the ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... tea-boxes, bundles of cinnamon sewn in bast, fruits, rice, spices, mountains of flour-sacks—everything had its designated place, from floor to roof. In one of the corners a stairway led to the cellar, where venerable hogsheads of wine with copper bands could be glimpsed in the half-light and where enormous metal tanks rested in ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... side. The parts which were left uncovered, the face, the neck, the shoulders, and the arms, were extremely luminous, and the stile had reproduced most effectively the glitter of the embroidery in the half-light and the mysterious quality of the symbols. A tall white hound, Famulus, brother to the one which lays its head on the knee of the Countess of Arundel in Rubens' picture, stretched his muzzle towards the lady, guarding her slumbers, and was designed with much ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... I became conscious that a door opposite me was open and the curtain drawn a little way back. There, in the half-light, I saw Mistress Ysolinde listening. She leaned her head aside as though it had been heavy with its weight of locks of burned gold. She pillowed her cheek against the door-post, and let her dreamy sea-green eyes rest upon me. And the look that was in them gave me a sense of pleasure strange ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... surrounded by guards. There were soldiers everywhere; two had stood behind the door when first she entered, and had immediately closed it with a loud clang behind her; and all the way down the corridors, through the half-light engendered by feebly flickering lamps, she caught glimpses of the white facings on the uniforms of the town guard, or occasionally the glint of steel of a bayonet. Presently Chauvelin paused beside a door, which he had just reached. His hand was on the latch, for it did ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... too willingly the news was dispersed. Fairchild's eyes were searching now in the half-light from the faint street bulbs. Then they centered. It was Anita Richmond, standing at the edge of the crowd, questioning a miner, while beside her was a thin, youthful counterpart of a hard-faced father, Maurice Rodaine. Just a moment of queries, then the miner's ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... the obelisk, are shooting over the southern crests, leaving the basement blue with a tint between the amethyst and the lapis lazuli, its northern third lies wrapped in a cloak of cold azure grey, and its central length already dons a half-light of warmer hue. Meanwhile, the side next the sun is flooded with an aerial aureole of subtle mist, a drift of liquid gold, a gush of living light, rippling from the unrisen orb, decreasing in warmth and brilliancy, paling and fading and waxing faint with infinite gradations ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... Highness turned to the books on the table and sought the volume of Swiss sermons; but it was not there; evidently Madame de Stafforth had forgotten to bring it from the salon. The Duchess decided to fetch it, but she lingered a moment, for it was unaccountably disagreeable to her to pass through the half-light of her ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... to use a slang term, they "mixed." Presently Cal, stretched the long length of him in the grass, with Pink sitting comfortably upon his middle, looked up at the dizzying swim of the moon, saw new and uncharted stars, and nearer, dimly revealed in the half-light, the self-satisfied, ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... then, standing in the gloomy half-light of this squalid room, with the slanting golden sunshine which peeped in through the tiny west window outlining her delicate silhouette and touching her smooth fair hair ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... eight o'clock, except in winter, when it was dark earlier. There was a certain half-shamefaced reserve about his visits. He knew well enough that people looked from their windows as he passed, and said, facetiously, "There goes Richard Alger to court Sylvy Crane." He preferred slipping past in a half-light, in which he did not seem so plain to himself, and could think himself less plain ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... impassible, looked at him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... "find" God in a way that others do not? Why does God manifest His Presence to some and let multitudes of others struggle along in the half-light of imperfect Christian experience? Of course the will of God is the same for all. He has no favorites within His household. All He has ever done for any of His children He will do for all of His children. The difference lies not with God ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... her attic that night she found that her deal box had been carried up and placed in one corner, and as she began to undress in the half-light she caught sight of something else which certainly had not been there before. Something standing in the window twisted and prickly, but to her most pleasant to look upon. Could it really be the cactus? She went up to it, half afraid to find that she was mistaken. No, it was not ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... eyes heavy and full of sepulchral darkness, strength. She had put on a dress of stiff old greenish brocade, that fitted tight and made her look tall and rather terrible, ghastly. In the gay light of the drawing-room she was uncanny and oppressive. But seated in the half-light of the diningroom, sitting stiffly before the shaded candles on the table, she seemed a power, a presence. She listened and attended with ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... saw a half-light in Phyllis's room. Coming nearer I saw that she was standing at the window, with the same cloud on her face that had betrayed the battle with her conscience. At sight of her all the joyous emotion of my new tenderness overwhelmed me and I ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... of radiant colors was trampled into paths that wound on to lose themselves in the half-light ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... oblong in shape, three high narrow windows admitting the light through small, old-fashioned panes. Just at present there was not much to admit, for it was raining hard, and the afternoon was wearing on to dusk; but even the wet half-light showed you solid mahogany furniture, old-fashioned as the windows themselves, black and shining with age and polish; a carpet soft and thick, but its once rich hues dim and faded; oil paintings of taste and merit, some of them portraits, on the papered ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... finding his key. "Pah!" they heard him mutter, and then, perhaps, something worse. The key was found, and he had then to bend his great height to squeeze through the little door. Once inside, he was at the corner of the Saint Margaret Chapel and could see, in the faint half-light, the rosy colours of the beautiful Saint Margaret window that glimmered ever so dimly upon the rows of cane-bottomed chairs, the dingy red hassocks, and the brass tablets upon the grey stone walls. He walked through, picking his way ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... house ages and the tenants leave it, Cricket sings in the tall grass by the threshold; Spider, by the cold mantel, hangs his web. Here, in a hundred years from that clear season When first I came here, bearing lights and music, To this old ghostly house my ghost will come,— Pause in the half-light, turn by the poplar, glide Above tall grasses through the broken door. Who will say that he saw—or the dusk deceived him— A mist with hands of mist blow down from the tree And open the door and enter and close it after? Who will ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... after the young man's departure Lady Constantine opened the post-bag anxiously. Though she had risen before four o'clock, and crossed to the tower through the gray half-light when every blade and twig were furred with rime, she felt no languor. Expectation could banish at cock-crow the eye-heaviness which apathy had been unable to disperse ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... the tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green. Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file patter out from one clump about a half-mile away and disappear with awkward gaiety into the black-ribbed half-light of another. John would not have been surprised to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph-skin and flying yellow hair between the greenest of ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... In the shadowy half-light of the room Shiela halted at a sign from the nurse; the doctor glanced up, nodding almost imperceptibly as the girl's eyes fell ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... they watched the long, golden going down of the sun, and the creeping shadows, and the purple half-light, and the after-smile upon the crests. And then the heaven gathered itself in its night stillness, and the mountains were grand in the soft gloom, until the full moon came ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... In the half-light that was left him he forced the cover and then rolled the drum about the swaying deck. The gray, earthly lumps of carbide formed erratic lines. Useless perhaps, he admitted, but the threatening dark forced the man to use every means at ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... dizzily aware of shouted orders, the creaking of the toiling, slipping ropes, little jolts and stoppages, two hundred eyes blinking up, not seeing their cringed-up limbs—unnecessary cautious: for the nearer they descended to-ward the half-light, the surer did the area of the lorry make their invisibility. At last they were near; the bell lingered, swinging; babel was around them; the Governor's voice; a cheer: the bell ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... after-dinner hour, and I was on the veranda for a quiet smoke. The Old Cattleman had just thrown down his paper; the half-light of the waning sun was a bit too dim for his eyes ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a name illustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait of Toschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in the dizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its expression of contemplative intelligence, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... of old oak in tapestried masses on which the figures of some hunting scene are swarming, pieces of furniture worthy to have belonged to Madame de Pompadour, Persian rugs, et cetera. For a last graceful touch, all these elegant things were subdued by the half-light which filtered through embroidered curtains and added to their charm. On a table between the windows, among various curiosities, lay a whip, the handle designed by Mademoiselle de Fauveau, which proved that ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... faint half-light, right in the middle of the road, racing with maddened speed, charging straight upon them, they saw a white horse with ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... madam; the half-light, the novelty of your costume, and the strangeness of the circumstance altogether must plead for me, if I ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... a time with her eyes fixed on the floor, then she raised her head and looked around at the void in which silence had fixed itself. The globe-lamps burning, here and there, at the walls, filled the drawing-room with a hazy, half-light, in which, here and there, glittered golden reflections, and the features of faces, and landscapes flimmered on pictures. Farther on, from the shady corner of the other drawing-room, slender and swelling vases appeared, partially; portions of white ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... through the half-light. Her features were turned in a direction that did not reveal them very well. What did she ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... have been sarcasm in this piece of advice, for I must have cut a ridiculous figure, peering awkwardly and suspiciously round, with shoulders and head bent to avoid the ceiling, which seemed in the half-light to be even nearer the floor than ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... he dozed, his head resting on his knees. He awoke, roused out of a vivid dream, a dream so detailed and so deeply impressed in a picture on his mind that he was confused when he blinked at the riverbank visible in the half-light of early dawn. ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... REALLY naughty he was to be placed in here as punishment and the gas turned out entirely. Teddy had never deserved this terrible fate, but he did not like the Cold Lairs, where his little crash wash-rag and his tiny toothbrush glimmered at him in the half-light, and where he always smelled the raw smell of the lemon his mother kept to whiten ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... time observed; but how joyous,—how really Christmas-like—how well it suited the soft half-light, the last pale shine of sunset lingering in the south-west! the large solemn stars that one by one appeared! How Uncle Geoffrey caught up the lines and sang them over to himself! How light and free Beatrice walked!—and how the quiet ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he's apparently playing the game." In the half-light, Smith stared at me significantly. "Which makes it all the more important," he concluded, "that we should not ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... you are!" exclaimed Miss Snell, excitedly. "Is he not charming, Cora, in that half-light? You must let me paint you just so some day—you must indeed." She clutched Miss Price and turned her ...
— Different Girls • Various
... other two huskies was more serious, however; for in the half-light Jan chanced to brush against one of them as he gnawed his bone; and in the next moment they both were leaping at him with clashing fangs, convinced that he aimed at plunder. While Jan, in warding off their attacks, tried to explain, good-humoredly, ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson |
