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CHAPTER XIV.
THE SPIDER AND THE FLY.
The April day had been very long, and very, very dull in the handsome
Walraven Fifth Avenue palace. Long and lamentable, as the warning cry
of the banshee, wailed the dreary blast. Ceaselessly, dismally beat the
rain against the glass. The icy breath of the frozen North was in the
wind, curdling your blood and turning your skin to goose-flesh; and the
sky was of lead, and the streets were slippery and sloppy, and the New
York pavements altogether a delusion and a snare.
All through this bad, black April day, Mollie Dane had wandered through
the house, upstairs and down-stairs, like an uneasy ghost.
Some evil spirit of unrest surely possessed her. She could settle
nowhere. She threw herself on a sofa in her pretty bedroom, and tried
to beguile the forlorn hours with the latest novel, in vain. She yawned
horribly over the pages and flung it from her in disgust.
She wandered down to the drawing-room and tried the grand piano, whose
tones were as the music of the spheres. Still in vain. The listless
fingers fell aimlessly on the ivory keys.
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