Page:Twilight of the Souls (1917).djvu/122

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CHAPTER VII

It had gone very, very still. The tired man had dozed off; it seemed as though his nerve-taut limbs had relaxed and lay loose and slack: the thin legs in the wide, creased trousers; the chest sunk under the rumpled coloured shirt; the narrow shoulders, the lean arms in the old coat, with its tired creases. And the features of his face had also fallen in, now that the nerves were at last resting; they had fallen in like an old man's: queer wrinkles furrowed the forehead and etched lines under the eyes and round the nose and mouth; the short, scanty beard formed a stubble around the long chin; and the hair too was thin and stubby, a little thin behind the ears. Addie looked at the hands of the sleeping man: long, thin fingers, in which a nervous tremor still lingered, a very slight tremor, as though quivers were passing under the skin, over the veins. . . The boy looked curiously at the hands, for he was always interested in hands, judging people more by their hands than by anything else: he did not exactly know why and certainly could not analyze it. And he could see those long, thin hands not only reaching out vaguely and ineffectually after art, but also laying hold of books with a more confident grasp,

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