The Girl He Did Not Marry baixar o livro de graça

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.1887 Excerpt: ... by the young mother and children, the younger of whom was very delicate. And so it happened that when, at last, after long years that seemed to her a whole eternity of suffering, Hazel was able to rise and walk and tread the world's ways again, a ghost, a wreck, a shadow of the Hazel that had been, came out and looked on a strange, changed world with altered eyes. Only in Alfred, faithful old Alfred, there was little or no change, save the marks of added years. Alfred was neither married nor likely to be; no woman had entered into Marian Chester's place in his heart. Her brother was left to Hazel still, but it seemed that all else was gone. Everything was hard in life now; but hardest of all to her it was to realise the hopeless ruin of the beauty which she had cherished so tenderly, which had brought her so little good, though the sense of its loss seemed now the bitterest pang of all. Even though the scars on her cheek and forehead had healed and left little or no trace behind, her beauty was none the less a thing of the past. Her charm had always lain more in colouring and expression, in blooming cheek and mobile smile, than in regularity of features. Now every trace of that lovely colouring, which had been her pride, was gone; not only had the roses faded for ever from her cheek and lip, but the pure lilies had given way to a sallow, sickly pallor. The features were thin and sharpened, the eyes sunken and hollow; lines that only age should have drawn were graven by suffering on the face that was only a ruin of itself. Hazel was no coward; she did not flinch from facing the truth. How well in the old days her mirror had known her sweet, fresh, smiling image! how long and often had she stood before that bright reflection, delighting in her own fairness, a...