Excerpt from The Passion of Paul Marillier A girl! A woman-child! You know better, Paul, than to think that I should think a young girl capable of carrying out the plans I have formed, the improvements I have designed. She will marry some thoughtless lad of her own age, and they will spend their life in London and come down once a year for the shooting. And that will be the end of the honour and glory of Blundell Court. Sir David shook back his snowy mane impatiently, and gazed out at the distant horizon with blue eyes grown dark with pain. He had a massive, leonine face, which suited well with his broad shoulders and stately figure his fine features were instinct with mingled regret and indignation of a sombre kind, as if he blamed Fortune for cutting short his line. His short beard and burly eyebrows were as white as the hair on his head; yet his bearing was not that of an old man, although he walked with a stick and his Shoulders were somewhat bowed. He suffered from rheumatism, which occasionally crippled his movements but his brain was Clear, and his eye undimmed by age. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.