|
|
|
More "Tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... someone asked why "a big, strong, healthy, etc., etc." Nobody seemed to be impressed by my splendid silence, but it was there all the same, and somebody was going to be very sorry before he got home. I touched my tie and lit a fresh cigarette. The air was tense. I could almost see my electric moment walking down the compartment to meet me. We were nearing a station. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... towards her. No, she had not changed so very much. Only something inside her seemed to have grown less tense, less self-confident. Also, she had not had Leonetta's advantages,—advantages that she herself had been chiefly instrumental in securing for her younger sister. More arts than that of wielding the French tongue are learned in Paris. Apparently she never had ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in her painful flight. The glare from the entrance of a moving picture show fell upon her. Somehow, in that light she felt safe. The shadows could not cross its yellow glare. She breathed more easily for a moment, then became tense. A man was coming out of the white and gold ginger-bread entrance, like a maggot from some huge cake. The man was small, middle-aged, dark, with unwieldy movements and evil, predatory eyes—"Like Victor Mahr!" she said aloud; ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... of flying loose to her heels, no drapery hung lower than her knees, and this without a check to her wonderful speed, nor embarrassment by the cumbering of the folds. She held her head as before; her lips were firmly set, only the tense nostrils gave her breath; not a sign of distress witnessed to the long sustaining of that ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... the great French sentimentalist with whom we have compared him, a suspicious distrust of all who came near him converted his social existence into a restless fever. He had the gift of interpreting every contradiction to one of his favorite principles as a personal injury to himself, and in the tense state of party feeling then prevailing, the opportunities for taking offence were not limited. Hazlitt was one of the chief marks singled out for abuse by the critics of Government. To constant self-tormentings from within and persecution from without, there was added ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the little poem from The Princess, (page 107) note how we are influenced by the tense emotion of the attendants who speak. We do not try to imitate them; but having made the scene stand out before us, we speak as we in imagination hear them, in ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... "free fall," which was the technical term for a rocket coasting upward or downward in space. But Cochrane braced himself, and his stomach-muscles were tense when the rockets stopped again and stayed off. The sensation of continuous fall began. An electronic speaker beside his chair began to speak. There were other such mechanisms beside each other passenger-chair, and the interior of the rocket ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Guy Cecil, be to blame? That did not seem any more likely. Manuel was afraid of Cecil, though he would not admit it, even to himself. The Englishman's chill restraint, even in moments of the most tense excitement, cowed the Cuban. Never had he been able to penetrate into his fellow-conspirator's thoughts. But that Cecil should have talked loosely of so vital, so terrible a secret? No. The grave itself was not more secretive than that quiet schemer, of whom nothing ever seemed to be known. ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... it's the fault of that confounded drink,' he answered, his heart tense with the hope of being rid of her. Then the packing began. Kate sat disconsolate on the sofa, and watched Dick folding up her dresses and petticoats. It seemed to her that everything had ended, and wearily she collected the pearls which had been scattered in last night's skirmishing. Some had been ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... the handsome but emaciated face was seated beside Schomberg in the stern-sheets of the launch. His body was long and loose-jointed, his slender fingers, intertwined, clasped the leg resting on the knee, as he lolled back in a careless yet tense attitude. On the other side of Schomberg sat another passenger, who was introduced by the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... grin lightened for a moment his tense young face. "You'll have to keep praying till the power's turned off. Nothing here you ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... probably find that it is an essential part of her femininity. Modern psychology and physiology have pointed out that the menstrual cycle of woman has a vast influence not only on her emotional nature but on her whole psychic life, so that there are times when she is more nervously tense, more apt to become hysterical or to yield to the influence of suggestion. Moreover, because of the emphasis on chastity and the taboos with which she was surrounded, any neurotic tendencies which might be inherent in her nature were sure to ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... Pike's huge form tense convulsively and involuntarily, and I noted the way his huge hands strained in their clutch on the bridge-railing. Beyond ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... something that Katherine would not lend herself to, except in so far as, occasionally, to remind her of some forgotten point in a rule that would suggest a way to work out the knotty problem, or to give her a cue as to case or tense, that would assist in ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... hip. Crouching like a startled tiger, with not a muscle moving, he peered anxiously into the darkness, his arm half extended, scarcely venturing to breathe. There came a plain, undisguised rustling in the grass,—some prowling coyote, probably; then his tense muscles immediately relaxed, and he cursed himself for being so startled, yet he continued to grasp the "45" in his ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... a tense period of waiting, the welcome report of the matchlock reverberated from ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... railway stations, Carrying men from all the nations, Olive-skinned French with clipped moustaches, Almond-eyed like Paris apaches. Rosy French with their faces shining From joy of living and love of dining. Silent Spaniards, merry Italians, Nobles, commoners, saints, rapscallions; Russians tense with the quest of truth That maddens manhood and saddens youth; Learned Norwegians hale and limber, Brown from the barques new in with timber. Oregon men of six feet seven With backs from Atlas and hearts from Heaven. Orleans ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... of his extra few inches of height to glance around the briefing room. He saw row on row of tense faces—faces that reflected the same emotions he was feeling. Space exploration was something still new and mostly unknown, and even the experienced men of IES still knew fear occasionally. The galaxy was a big place; unknown terrors lurked on planets ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... lamp, my white brother," he whispered in the same tense tones, "to do so would be to reveal to those who are now approaching that we are awake and expect them. Rather let us pretend that we are unaware that they come and spring upon them like the leopard when she ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... behind the hazel bushes on the other side of the enclosure came an answer, a second neighing, deeper and fuller. The swampy ground of the enclosure shook, powerful hoofs scattered the stones, to right and left and a black stallion appeared at full gallop. The tense neck carried a magnificent head, the muscles lay like ropes under the glossy skin. As he caught sight of the mare, his eyes began to flash. He stopped and stretched out his neck as if he were going to yawn, raised his upper lip and showed his teeth. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... in the front room, and the woman put on her cap and ran in; Jane stood where she left her. She hardly knew what moved her to-night; she saw her own body walking about, tense and foreign, as though some possession had it; she had felt a new, strange kind of strength all day, after she had her cry out. She looked up at the picture again, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... in the farm, in all that landscape the only living thing at the moment, except for the animals. A tense energy of will seemed to possess her. She was defending herself—defending Ellesborough—and their joint lives. How was she going to do it? She didn't know. But the passion in her blood would give ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... look and your reputation," she said calmly, "was worth a woman's looking up. When that woman had need for a man." Her eyes were glittering now; she leaned forward, suddenly rigid and tense and breathing hard. "When I have found a man who stakes ten thousand, twenty thousand on one throw and is not moved; who returns ten thousand in rage because a word of pity goes with it, am I ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... three strides he was standing over Antony Ferrara, fists clenched and his sinewy body tense in every fibre. His face was pale, as was apparent even in that vague light, and his ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... woman raised her startled, frightened eyes, and for a moment her glance met Harley's; it seemed to him to be full of entreaty; the whole atmosphere of the place was to him tense, strained, and tragic; why, he did not know, but he shook himself and decided that it was only the result of weariness, the long ride, and the night in the storm. Nevertheless, the feeling did not depart because he willed that ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... ingenious men, indeed, have endeavoured to deserve well of their country, by writing honor and labor for honour and labour, red for read in the preter-tense, sais for says, repete tor repeat, explane for explain, or declame for declaim. Of these it may be said, that as they have done no good they have done little harm; both because they have innovated little, and ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... at the head of the stairs, came a sound that stiffened him to a tense wariness. A key was being turned in the lock of the street door below. He moved back into the deeper shadows ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... Pevroque qui, house of Pedro. The verb was, does not now exist in it apart, but in expression it appears, or nearly so, in the substantive qui, which is put in the imperfect by the termination of that tense, ru being added, as, quiru, was house; no quiru, was my house. The same is otherwise said: Pevroque qui no guaguaru, the house of Pedro was mine; the guagua, if ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... stir. He could not. Even to his crude imagining there was something utterly horrible in the thought of Creed alone at that hour in just such black darkness as this, with the great timbered chamber haunted at least by its dread memories. He could only wait, tense and fearful of ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... O——, of M——, AEt. 63. Very painful and general swellings in all his limbs, which had confined him mostly to his bed since the preceding winter; the swellings were uniform, tense, and resisting, but the skin not discoloured. After trying guiacum and Dover's powder without advantage. I directed Infusion of Digitalis. It acted on the kidneys, but did net relieve him. It is not easy to say ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... under his foot came a strident, warning buzz, and an icy ripple moved down his back. A snake! And he couldn't even see it! He froze where he was, muscles tense for the shock of needle-sharp fangs. He waited an eternity, not even daring to breathe. There were voices from within the hotel, but he didn't hear what they were saying. At that moment he couldn't possibly ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... restlessly upon the floor. The atmosphere was surcharged with expectancy, then grew tense with waiting. Alden's eyes ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... on every one, irrespective of regiment, to rally around him and face the foe. He wore no golden leaf—no silver star. He was appealing to officers higher in command than himself, who, mixed with the crowd, were hurrying by. His manner, tense with excitement, was strung up to the pitch of heroism, and his presence was like an inspiration, as he stood outside the mass, a mark for the bullets ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... and looked ahead. Step by step he traced the marks on up the hill in the direction of the dugout, and, at last, silent speculation gave place to tense, low-spoken words. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... went on after a tense moment of silence, "what's the use of making a row? I know I lied to you—I had to do it in order to get the money. I just framed that on purpose so I could get back to New York where a proposition like mine would be appreciated. I was a bum, in Gunsight; but back in New York, where they ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... at her with an attention which had become absorbed, exclusive. "Do you know, I thought virtue was what women didn't care about in men?" he said, and his voice was tense with curiosity. ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... an absolute 'slaughter-house.' Though we had only twenty-five killed and twenty-eight wounded (some of whom afterwards died) on that day, yet numbers were torn into fragments, (men with their muscles tense, subjected to violent concussion, seem as brittle as glass,) causing the deck and its surroundings to present a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... commentator on Winckelmann is of the same opinion with that learned person, and is incensed at Nardini for not having remarked that Cicero, in speaking of the wolf struck with lightning in the Capitol, makes use of the past tense. But, with the Abate's leave, Nardini does not positively assert the statue to be that mentioned by Cicero, and if he had, the assumption would not perhaps have been so exceedingly indiscreet. The Abate himself is obliged to own that there are marks very like the scathing of lightning in the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Some tense situations in the story of the Deerslayer are associated with Three-Mile Point, the present picnic resort of Cooperstown; and a full understanding of the events described as having taken place on this spot almost depends upon some reference to the actual ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... "Her tense features showed that she was weighing the meaning of the words, and I can still see her as she suddenly drew up her small figure, and said proudly, 'Yes, I will ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to his feet. The footsteps were close at hand now upon the tessellated pavement. Then through the drooping palm boughs they saw him. Julien was standing tense and prepared, his uninjured arm was ready to strike. ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... earthly hurry. He felt sure of it. In the silence and the blackness—in the tense, steamy atmosphere of expectancy—he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that there was superstition to be reckoned with—and that is something which a white man finds hard to weigh and cope ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... who talk at great length of much more than they will ever accomplish; of the slovenly English, who toil hopelessly and cannot understand that inclination does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... this spying head; its face dead-white against the dense green of the verdure, with shocks of long white hair hanging down on each side, framing between them a pair of eyes that gleamed from cavernous sockets, like black glowing beads. There was unmistakable fear, a tense anxiety in those glittering eyes as Captain Plum walked toward the paper, but when he paused and stretched himself, the sole of his boot carelessly trampling the discarded letter, the head disappeared again and there came another satisfied bird-like ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... A tense litheness had passed into the rough rider's figure. It was as though every sense were alert to catch ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... tense moment on both sides; then Warner sent the ball flying high and far. It was Westby's ball; the St. John's ends and one of their tackles came down fast under ...
— The Jester of St. Timothy's • Arthur Stanwood Pier
... now. He waved aside those who tried to take him up and bear him to the platform. He walked down the aisle alone and ascended amid a tense silence; he stood looking calmly out. His face had lost its whiteness of a few minutes before. As he stood there, big and still, a sort of embodiment of fearlessness, I wondered—and I fancy many others were wondering—whether he was about to refuse the nomination. But an instant's thought ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... bunched with hair. The General scraped one of his finger nails, the Colonel of the Gendarmerie {8} fans himself with a newspaper; the practitioners talk among themselves as they feel the men. My turn comes at last. They examine me from head to foot, they press down on my stomach, swollen and tense like a balloon, and with a unanimity of opinion the council grants me a convalescent's leave of ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... astonishment, Gideon saw that he had singled out the Indian chief, and was riding down upon him. He saw the lariat shoot out from the uplifted hand like a wriggling snake. The wide loop opened like a wheel, grew suddenly tense and smaller. Then it dropped clean over Broken Feather's head and shoulders, and in an instant the chief's two arms were pinioned to ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... Tense with excitement the girls stood up and faced each other. There was an extra loud crash of thunder and a vivid flash of lightning. There emerged from behind the altar a tall figure in a priest's black ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... impossible for him to go slowly. Whenever Slone came to corrugated stretches in the trail he felt grateful. But these were few. The rock was like smooth red iron. Slone had never seen such hard rock. It took him long to realize that it was marble. His heart seemed a tense, painful knot in his breast, as if it could not beat, holding back in the strained suspense. But Nagger never jerked on the bridle. He never faltered. Many times he slipped, often with both front feet, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort a certain smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent visits; but here ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less, no different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips whiten and draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a convulsive spasm wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid silence, and then one deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and flesh collapse as the Life is set loose. The damp body sinks back, leaving its death sweat on my arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is dead. But ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... decarbonized iron, wrought iron; nail; brick, concrete; cement. V. render hard &c. adj.; harden, stiffen, indurate, petrify, temper, ossify, vitrify; accrust[obs3]. Adj. hard, rigid, stubborn, stiff, firm; starch, starched; stark, unbending, unlimber, unyielding; inflexible, tense; indurate, indurated; gritty, proof. adamant, adamantine, adamantean[obs3]; concrete, stony, granitic, calculous, lithic[obs3], vitreous; horny, corneous[obs3]; bony; osseous, ossific[obs3]; cartilaginous; hard as a rock &c. n.; stiff as buckram, stiff as a poker; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... bound up in Berselius; he had developed an affection for this man almost brotherly, and Schaunard's remark hit him and made him wince. For Schaunard employed the present tense. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... at the cave-opening just ahead. He was a bungling woodsman at best; and now, stalking that greatest of all big game, man, the blood drummed in his ears and his heart seemed to slip a cog or two with every beat. He stood tense, yet trembling, for the space in which a man might count ten; surely if there were any one inside the cave—if the one whose presence he suspected were there—such a noise would have brought him forth. But a great banner of trumpet-creeper, which ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... creature his gaze has fallen upon since the battle. They will note her gladness to see him and to know that he is safe. They will see the dancing of her eyes and hear her rippling, joyous laughter. They will become tense as the father is telling her of his vow. But the climax is reached when they hear her saying, "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth." And, with bated breath, they see her meeting death ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... tossed his head impatiently, but made no answer. From the moment Hanson had spoken he had assumed an air of immobile and concentrated attention, tense as that of an Indian listening and sighting in a forest, or of a highly ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... went off behind a tree, so close that the novelist leaped out of his seat with an eldrich screech; for he had long ago forgotten all about Mr. Reginald, and, when he got heated in this kind of composition, any sudden sound seemed to his tense nerves and boiling brain about ten times as loud as it ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... called his Hegira, the turning-point of his history. That it shortened his span there can be little doubt. Had he settled down to literary work, in his native city, he might have lived to old age. But it secured him four years of the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart was set; and during two of these years the joy was of a kind which absolved him for ever from the reproach of mere hedonism and self-indulgence. He would certainly have said—or rather he was continually saying, in ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... white sensations while we are active towards the black and red ones; we shall not measure the white; not sweep our glance along it as we do along the red and the black. And as ceteris paribus our tense awareness of active states always throws into insignificance a passive state sandwiched between them; so, bent as we are upon our red and black extensions, and their comparative lengths and directions, we shall treat the uninteresting ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... their destination. On the way they encounter various characters, some good and honourable, and others very much the reverse. Finally they arrive and set to work seeking for gold. Of course there are more adventures and tense situations, as you would expect from ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... speaks in the preterite tense, this was always true of him, and his thought seems often to lean upon a word too weak to bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight can help regretting that he did not earlier give himself to "the trade of classic ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... of deference in theory, in practice she craved it, and expected it, and was irritated if she did not get it. But, as she realized how unattractive this weakness was, she usually took perhaps more pains than does the average person to conceal it. That day her nerves were too tense for petty precautions. However, Mrs. Colman was too busy inspecting the details of Miss Hastings' toilet to note Miss ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... both of man and beast," from the time of the death of the first-born of the Egyptians. The impropriety of ex post facto legislation, the reason assigned for this law, and the grammatical meaning of the language in the present tense, all combine to show that the law is prospective; and the number of the first-born, twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-five, afterward given in Numbers, shows plainly that this is the meaning, being about the proper increase of thirteen months. But the bishop strangely blunders into the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... me now," he exclaimed under his breath, tense and rigid with the vast futile effort of his will. "Come to me now, now. Don't you hear me, Angele? ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... place—a beautiful place, indeed," and then straightway returned to the house. Edgecomb, slack grammarian though he was, made note of the fact that he spoke of the house in the past tense, quite as if it were a thing ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... Tish exultantly, and stopped the car with a jerk. In an instant she was out in the road, cutting lengths of barbed wire from a fence with the scissors and placing them across the road behind us. Her expression was set and tense. When she had placed some six pieces of wire in position, she returned to ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... usual well-written sequence of tense moments we get from this author. A good read, and a nice audiobook if you prefer ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... and shouted. And then a tense silence followed, as the first kick-off sent the pigskin ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... her nerves tense, Josephine kept her mind fixed on one point. She was waiting anxiously for the first chance to protest. At a ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... minutes were approved. The regular business of the meeting forthwith began, and the atmosphere, which had been a little tense, relaxed. As if to show his ease and familiarity with an unusual situation, Mr. Mowry cut off a large piece of tobacco, crossed his hands behind his head, and lifted his right leg on the top of the small oak desk which was supposed to contain pen and paper for personal use, but which ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... rigid rule with regard to the use of the preterite tense? When do you say "hung" and when do you say "hanged"? A. Two examples from a universally recognised authority will illustrate the flexibility of our language in the general use of tenses: (1) "'I know a gen'l'man, sir,' ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... his pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought you said he ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Tracy wanted to be urged to ask her niece to Stoke Revel, or whether she wanted to be supplied with a really plausible excuse for not doing so. Those of you who have seen a hound at fault can imagine the companion at this moment: irresolute, tense, desperately anxious to find and follow up the right scent. Compromise, that useful refuge, came ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... no more. She arose, the tears blinding her, and slipped quietly out. She had seen Jean looking over the gallery railing with serious eyes, and Stuart standing by a pillar with a group of fellow-students, his face pale and tense. She dared not risk meeting them or anyone else she knew. She hurried down the stairs and out along the street struggling for her self-control. Half consciously her footsteps turned in the direction of that little ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... second is by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... outside. One of the Hounds called out, "I don't want any of you girls to kiss me!" and gave the relief of indignation to the hysterical emotion of the believers; the more serious of the unbelievers found escape in their helpless laughter from their tense expectation of triumph in the failure ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... anxious heart told itself, favoured the oft-victorious giant; but then,—and here came reason for a true Hellene,—"the gods could not suffer so fair a man to meet defeat." The noonday sun beat down fiercely. The tense stillness was now and then broken by the bawling of a swarthy hawker thrusting himself amid the spectators with cups and a jar of sour wine. There was a long rest. The trainers came forward again and dusted the two remaining champions with sand that they might grip fairly. Pytheas looked keenly ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... by oncomers like myself and friend Jenks who had lumbered behind me. Montoyo's horse stood heaving, on the outskirts; and ruthlessly pushing through I found him inside, with My Lady at bay before him—her eyes brilliant, her cheeks hot, her two hands clenched tightly, her slim figure dangerously tense within her absurd garment, and the arm of the brightly flushed but calm Rachael resting restraintfully around ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... substantive made from the preterperfect tense of bend. The space lying between two promontories or headlands, being wider and smaller than a gulf, but larger than a bay. It is also used generally for any coast-bend or indentation, and is mostly held as a synonym of ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... hardly have done this, but his boyish love for the girls and their boat could not be restrained. Then they waved, and the maroon and white flag stood out tense and defiant ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... he did not hear her. His face was set and white, his blue eyes glowed black. He stood with lips parted, waiting for the cue to begin. His audience, to most of whom the song was known, caught by a mysterious telepathy the tense emotion of the boy, and stood silent and eager, all smiles gone from their faces. The song was in the Ruthenian tongue, but was the heart cry of a Russian exile, a cry for freedom for his native land, for death to the tyrant, for ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... collectively and in detail. He devoted his chief attention, however, to Big Waller. He "caught" that gigantic Yankee in every conceivable action and attitude. He photographed him, we might almost say, with his legs apart, the hatchet high above his head, and every muscle tense and rigid, preliminary to a sweeping blow. He "took" him with a monstrous pile of logs on his brawny shoulder; he portrayed him resting for a moment in the midst of his toil; he even attempted to delineate him tumbling over one of the logs, and hurling a shoulder-load upon ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... tamen edit eximie pecus, bibit Non pessime, stertit sepultum crapula, Operam veneri dat, et voluptatum assecla Est omnium. Idne est mortuum esse mundo? Aliter interpretare. Mortui sunt Hercule Mundo cucullati, quod inors tense sunt onus, Ad rem utiles nullam, nisi ad scelus ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... not unfrequently the actual form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... bed and listened with all his might. Outside the window of the little room he occupied that night in the captain's cottage he was almost certain he had heard the sound of a furtive footfall and whisperings. His blood beat in his ear-drums as he sat tense and rigid, waiting a repetition of ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... supporting sling; and, afterward, went over and talked with Aunt Ruth before passing out and going round to his side of the divided house. But so long as he remained in sight, Cleek's narrowed eyes followed him and the tense creases seamed Cleek's indrawn, silent lips. But when he broke that silence it was to speak to the captain and to say some silly, pointless thing about that refuge of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... precipice on Long's Peak. Time has not changed the character of that face—it is sheer and smooth and icy now, as then. He was probably the first man to attempt its descent, and I was always weak and spent when he ended his story of it, so vividly did he portray its dangers. I sat tense, digging my nails deep into my palms, living through every squirm and twist with him, from the moment he slid down from the comparatively safe "Narrows" to the first niche in the glassy, precipitous wall, till, after many nearly-the-last experiences, he landed safely at its foot. That adventure ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... in and hit the scramble button. Three minutes later two F-86's were headed UFOward. They soon disappeared but their vapor trails kept the tense crowd ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... was strained to catch a glimpse of one familiar figure. She had little difficulty in singling him out from the rest. He had stripped off his sweater and stood with head well down, his great limbs tense, straining for the word to spring. Anna's breath came quickly, as if she had been running, the roses that he had sent her heaved with the tumult in her breast. It seemed to her as if she must cry out with the ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... were about to make some desperate appeal to them all. Some words did indeed seem to come from her lips, but the scraping of chairs drowned every other sound. Nevertheless that figure was there, the hands stretched out, the very soul struggling through the eyes for expression, the body tense, sacred, eloquent, like the body of some young prophetess. Then all were on their knees, and Maggie, too, her face in her hands, was praying. It was, perhaps, the first time in her life that she had actively, consciously, of her own volition prayed. The appeal formed itself as it were without ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... himself to the work. The truth was that Jimmy was one of those men who are charged to the brim with force. Somehow, the force had to find an outlet. If he had undertaken to collect birds' eggs, he would have set about it with the same tense energy. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... which brought some tense moments to the Baxter household, Jane remained calm; and she was still calm upon the eighth morning as she stood in the front yard of her own place of residence, gazing steadily across the street. The object ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... Others go by carrying huge baskets of grapes or loads of wood, and gradually it penetrates the mind that all these workers are women, aristocrats and peasants side by side. Now and then a bugle blows or a drum beats in the distance. A squad of soldiers marches quickly by. There is everywhere the tense atmosphere of unusual circumstance, the ...
— War Brides: A Play in One Act • Marion Craig Wentworth
... reached the shut-in staircase and carefully unlocked its narrow door. But by the time I had reached the fourth floor, and unlocked, with the same key, the only other door that had a streak of light under it, I had gained a certain degree of tense composure born of the desperate nature of the occasion. The calmness with which I pushed open the door proved this—a calmness which made the movement noiseless, which was the reason, I suppose, why I was enabled to suppress the shriek that rose to my lips as I saw that the room had occupants, and ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... faces of the children Flooded with sweet innocence! God's smile on their foreheads glisten Ere their heart-strings have grown tense. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... receding shores, with their maze of yellow lights. Life had changed for me during the last few weeks. The old, placid days of content were over; already I was in a new world, a world of bigger things, where the great game was being played, with the tense desperateness of those who gamble with life and death. I had not sought the change! Rather it had been forced upon me. I had no ambitions to gratify; the old life had pleased me very well. I had quitted it simply upon compulsion. And here I was with unfamiliar ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had died from the girl's face and sparkling eyes. She sat on the floor, her hands round her knees, defiance in every tense feature. Mrs. Friend was conscious of renewed alarm and astonishment, and at last found ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you in the present tense, lends in the conditional mood, keeps you in the subjective, and ruins you in ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... now—for once he was devoting all his faculties to tense and absorbed concentration on what another man could tell, leaving reflections and conclusions on what he heard until all had ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... and placing himself before it, uttered a hollow, low, long-drawn-out howl, when the bones came compactly together. He then modulated his howl, when the bones knit together and became tense. The third howl brought sinews upon them, and the fourth, flesh. He then turned his head upwards, looking into the sky, and gave a howl, which caused every one in the village to startle, and the ground itself to tremble, at which ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... his eyes while the doctor counted his pulse. During the ensuing silence it struck Esther that both women were more worried than was necessary. The Frenchwoman in particular watched with an air of tense apprehension. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... thud-thud of the screw that had pounded for many weeks. It was late; so late that most of the ship's lights were extinguished. But all through her was a feeling of pulsating life, of unrest, of a kind of tense excitement, of long-pent expectation. There were low voices everywhere; feet paced the decks; along the port railings on each deck soldiers were clustered thickly, looking out across the grey, tossing sea to a winking light that flashed and twinkled ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... end he would share the fate of the great majority and attain only mediocrity; having missed that one great blinding shaft of pain or joy that might have stabbed him into tense, pulsing life, and spurred him up the ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... Ironworker with the irresistible attraction of antipathy. The verro stood silent and as if abstracted among his admirers, who formed a circle around him. He seemed not to see the others, fixing his eyes on Margalida with a tense expression, as if he would conquer her with this stare which inspired fear in men. When the Little Chaplain, with the enthusiasm of youth, approached the verro, he deigned to smile, seeing in the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mug to his lips, mouthing the stinging liquid in dull despair. Only, instead of bringing nausea with it, the stuff settled his stomach, cleared his head, with an after glow with which he managed to relax from the tense state of endurance which filled his hours ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... and hit the scramble button. Three minutes later two F-86's were headed UFOward. They soon disappeared but their vapor trails kept the tense crowd informed of ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... Friedrich finds that Loudon was there last night,—preterite tense, alas; the question now being, Where is he!" In fact, Loudon had written yesterday to Daun (Letter still extant, "Sommerfeld, July 31st"), That "being swift and light," consisting of horse for most part, "he may probably effect ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in a sort of tense whisper. He was mortally afraid Nan would become conscious, and see what was going on about her. But he might have spared himself the trouble. She was absolutely blind to the crowd that had gathered about them, and all the commendation she was aware of was that which ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... matter?" she inquired, vaguely troubled by the tense stillness in the attitude of both ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... gazing attentively down on the bed of Oriental poppies at the foot of the steps, and though he had taken no part in the conversation, something in his back, in the rigid look of his shoulders, as though his muscles were drawn and tense, made me say suddenly: ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... wearied by personal labor, as in earlier stages of industry, it is to-day the unremitting, tense concentration of watching the machine, the necessary rapidity of motion, ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... From thy forehead made bare, From the gleam of thy bow-bearing hand? Hast thou set not thy right hand again to the string, With the back-bowed horns bent sharp for a spring 1410 And the barbed shaft drawn, Till the shrill steel sing and the tense nerve ring That pierces the heart of the dark with dawn, O huntsman, O king, When the flame of thy face hath twilight in chase As a hound hath a blood-mottled fawn? He has glanced into golden the grey sea-strands, And the clouds are ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a trifle from its first course, fluttered to and fro an instant, then neared a woman, who sat listlessly by herself, her arms resting upon those of her chair and her eyes, dark and sad, fastened upon the far horizon. There was a tense quiet in her attitude that seemed to cover something ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... followed closely the original tale. The entire music was composed by Edmond Rickett, who wrote melodies for a number of London Christmas pantomimes. The scenery, by Maxfield Parrish, was composed of six stage pictures, simple, harmonious, and beautiful, with tense blue skies, a dim suggestion of the forest, and the quaint architecture of the House of the Seven Dwarfs. Pictures in old nursery books were the models for the scenes. Because of the simplicity of the plot and the few characters, Snow White could be played ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... shoulders as though she had carried baskets of fruit or washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a deer, or a snake, or a bacchanalian dancer, as you will; but in any case in a way which in the present tense caused the Principal to mourn in secret, and in the future brought the condemnation of women and the eyes of men full ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... staring eyes, all her fear turned to anger at these men who dared appear in public after the cowardly attack they had made upon her. She darted in front of them and blocked their way, her eyes blazing and her body tense. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... waiting," was the tense reply. "We shall know when they find the Revenge. They are not apt to miss her, with a compass in the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... one hand and to the commercial interest on the other. The time had now arrived for the Republican nominee to proceed from Springfield to Washington. The journey was circuitous in order to enable Lincoln to speak at a number of places. Never before, probably, had the Northern people felt such tense strain as at that moment; never had they looked to an incoming President with such anxious doubt. Would he prevent war? Or, if he could not do that, would he be able to extricate the country—Heaven alone knew how!—without a terrible ordeal? Since his election, Lincoln had remained quietly ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... cannot tell it always by the form of the word. The main difference is, that the subjunctive has no -s as the ending of the present tense, third person singular; as, ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... according to Merrill, had the Parisinus at his disposal, has corrected two obvious misprints, made an inevitable change in the tense of a verb—with or without the help of the ancient book—and introduced from that book one unfortunate reading which we find in the ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... in among its tangled fellows; if the men agree, ten boat-hooks are thrust into it. Then for a moment the poles stand out from the log like the strings of a harp; a mighty "Ho!" from the gang, a short, tense haul, and it moves a trifle forward. A fresh grip, another shout, and forward again. It is like watching half a score of ants about a twig. And at last the freed log slides out and away ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... bottom of his heart, he bowed ever so slightly to the tense figure on the step and strode away ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... descendants in a by-gone century, as an immutable basis of constitutional interpretation, was met by loud and indignant protest from the North. The people and press of that section seized upon the salient phrase of the statement, and applying it in the present tense, accused the Chief-Justice with saying that "a negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." This was certainly a distortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... earth was shrouded in darkness, and the bulk of it trembled in sympathy with the death throes of its Maker, the spirit world also received the imprint of the terrible event on Calvary as for a moment the whole spiritual creation lay in tense expectancy. The usual occupations were suspended. Speech became low and constrained. Songs ended abruptly, and laughter ceased. There were no audible sobs, neither sighing. Bird and beast were stilled, ...
— Added Upon - A Story • Nephi Anderson
... the present tense, lends in the conditional mood, keeps you in the subjective, and ruins ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... his business: his slowness to speak created an atmosphere. There was no jest in his voice or manner. The air grew tense. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... patient finish, the complete thought given to every detail in the works of the greatest painters, the accumulated light and depth, the abounding life, with the hasty, jagged, contemporary manner of painting, straining into harshness from want of patience, tense and angular from want of real vitality, exhausted from the absence of inward repose. They will comment for themselves upon the pessimism to which so many surrender themselves, taking with them their religious art, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the misty air, for there had ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... astonishment, and when he had finished with the tense frown which involuntarily accompanied the effort of stopping the horse dead within its own length, his face softened into a beautiful smile. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Cavaliers. Words, it was said, may easily be misunderstood by a dull man. They may be easily misconstrued by a knave. What was spoken metaphorically may be apprehended literally. What was spoken ludicrously may be apprehended seriously. A particle, a tense, a mood, an emphasis, may make the whole difference between guilt and innocence. The Saviour of mankind himself, in whose blameless life malice could find no acts to impeach, had been called in question for words spoken. False witnesses had suppressed a syllable which would have made it clear that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The muscles are all lax - the head is drooping, the arms are closing in around the face, the wings are folding, the knees are bending - and she too will soon sink to slumber with the world in her arms. What a fine contrast of feeling between the tense young "Sun" and relaxed ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... narratives of travel as the histories, traditions, romances, and stories of places. They seek to tell stories at the places where the events occurred and amid the associations of the events that still remain. The Zigzag Club go seeking what is old rather than what is new, and thus change the past tense of history to ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of that suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon until it was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved over and over again a tense situation. To the guest in her house Barbara was the perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of convention raged fury with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer social animal for what he is and suck the honey from his flowers of unconventionality. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... foolish. There is always some pleasure at hand; seize it, and at no time will you be without pleasure. You cannot change the past, but your spirit at this moment will in some measure shape your future. Live life, therefore, in the present tense; do not miss ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... faulty tendons when he was five and proved a Spartan patient. He stood now waiting for Mr. Baggs. Other victims had reported that it was Levi's custom to use a strap from his own waist when he beat a boy, and Abel, even at this tense moment, wondered whether he would ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... down into your ears" was His forceful prelude on this occasion, in Galilee. Then followed the reiterated prediction, spoken in part in the present tense as though already begun in fulfilment: "The Son of man is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after that he is killed, he shall rise the third day." We read with some surprize that the apostles still failed to understand. Luke's comment ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... ready for launching there comes a moment of tense excitement before the dogshores are knocked away and she slides down the ways. In the case of a ship this excitement is shared by many thousands, who have assembled to acclaim the birth of a perfected ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... and white and tearless, stood Rachel. I was almost afraid of the child as I looked at her. She turned her great eyes upon me dumbly, with so exactly Bronson's expression in them that all at once I understood her. I knelt down beside her, and gathering her little tense frame all up in my arms, I began whispering to her. The tears rolled down her cheeks, and soon she was crying hysterically. Bronson came bounding upstairs at the sound, but she seized me more tightly around the neck and held me chokingly. I motioned ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... elderly warrior picked up a stone and handed it to the dandy with an expressive gesture. Instead of obeying he shook his head despairingly, and an ominous growl came from the assemblage. Again Donald looked at Christie, whose face was now tense and drawn, as though he ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... forms all of the distinctions of mood and tense, person and number, found in the English, and form their participles, and are changed into verbal or participial nouns; and these modifications are for, the most ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... been proved satisfactory, the Master rapped for order. Silence fell. The men settled down to listen, in tense expectancy. Some took chairs, others occupied the divan, still others—for whom there were no seats—stood ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... last night; ten fifteen to ten seventeen. We got the night long distance operator out of bed, and she confirmed it; Rivers took the call himself. He gets a lot of long distance calls in the evenings; she knew his voice." He corrected himself, shifting to the past tense and glancing, as he did, at the chalk outline on the floor, now scuffed by many feet, and the dried bloodstains. "You say this puts Gresham in ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... startled tiger, with not a muscle moving, he peered anxiously into the darkness, his arm half extended, scarcely venturing to breathe. There came a plain, undisguised rustling in the grass,—some prowling coyote, probably; then his tense muscles immediately relaxed, and he cursed himself for being so startled, yet he continued to grasp the "45" in his right hand, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... swarthy face grew sallow with fury. His eyes blazed, and there was a tense vibrato in his voice as ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... have been nearly two hundred men, women and children lining the crest of the bluff, and speaking in low, tense voices when they spoke at all, and straining their eyes for the next sight of the coming courier or the swift dash of the intercepting Sioux. Well out now, and riding at the gallop, Blake and his half dozen, widely separating so as to cover much of the ground, were still in view, and Dade and ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... Observatory. I was again alone. A reaction of despondency overwhelmed me, and it was coincident with a hemorrhage, which left me weak and nervous. I resumed my watching at the station. I seemed to anticipate a new message. I endured peculiar and excruciating excitement, a tense suspense of desire and prevision that deprived me of appetite and sleep, and accelerated the ravages of the disease, that now, victorious over my weakened, nervous force, began the last ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... retorted, in a tense voice. "I've no doubt she's as slipshod—as easy-going, I should say, as her father. The idea of her not waiting for advice from her relatives before she took such a step and came to a strange land uninvited; but she's our flesh and blood, Calvin, and she's in her teens yet. What are you ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... upon the porch with the faint tracing of a frown upon her smooth forehead, and with that slight tightening of the lips which to her family meant determination; disapproval sometimes, tense ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... way to ruining himself and his home. The children were yet young, and depended on the breadwinner. William gave her the sense of relief, providing her at last with someone to turn to if Morel failed. But the tense atmosphere of the room on these waiting ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... however, was that, seated beside his desk, in an easy chair, was a striking looking woman, not exactly young, but of an age that is perhaps more interesting than youth, certainly more sophisticated. She, too, I noticed, had a tense, excited expression on her face. As Kennedy and I entered she had looked us ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... swathed in lustrous gold—the chariot of the goddess herself. The awful splendour of the scene tended to depress one and make the task more trying. I have never felt more nervous than I did in that ghostly light in the tense silence, surrounded by the hidden horror of fathomless depths. All was covered with a uniform layer of snow, growing deeper and heavier at every step. I was ahead and went through eight times in about four miles. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... will proceed to the evidences by which I propose to try to prove its soundness." Wilson took up several of his strips of glass. When the audience recognized these familiar mementos of Pudd'nhead's old time childish "puttering" and folly, the tense and funereal interest vanished out of their faces, and the house burst into volleys of relieving and refreshing laughter, and Tom chirked up and joined in the fun himself; but Wilson was apparently not disturbed. He arranged his records on the table ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stage that the players sat up and knew beyond peradventure that big hands were out. Though their features showed nothing, each man was beginning unconsciously to tense. Each man strove to appear his natural self, and each natural self was different. Hal ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the red-hot energy which underlay Holmes's phlegmatic exterior when one saw the sudden change which came over him from the moment that he entered the fatal apartment. In an instant he was tense and alert, his eyes shining, his face set, his limbs quivering with eager activity. He was out on the lawn, in through the window, round the room, and up into the bedroom, for all the world like a dashing foxhound drawing a cover. In the bedroom he made ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as to direction. A voice from overhead or broken by echoing obstacles does not readily betray its source. Finally she stood up and listened once more intently—her attitude full of tense earnestness. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... now," he exclaimed under his breath, tense and rigid with the vast futile effort of his will. "Come to me now, now. Don't you hear me, Angele? ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... out that all other sounds have lost their significance. One seems to have become all ears—to have no sense of sight or touch or taste or smell. All seem to have become merged in the sense of hearing. The very air itself seems tense with listening. Only the occasional rattle of a machine gun breaks the stillness. ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... woman—just as other women, just as other women." Her voice sounded like a moan. "I thought myself different, stronger—perhaps worse than other women. I was wrong. Oh, Bertie! cannot you see that she loves you as I loved you long ago—oh, so long ago? And someone has said that there is no past tense in love! No, no! she does not love you as I loved you—guiltily; no, her love is the love that purifies, that exalts. She loves you, and she waits for you to tell her that you love her. You love ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... a stark pause. Abner stiffened, grew tense, as one becomes at the moment of bursting into dynamic action, but he did not stir. Scattergood was surprised, but he was more surprised by Abner's next words. "I hain't goin' to half kill you on account ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... of September Christopher began to relax his long hours of work and the tense look on ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... other places. Donnegan turned and saw in the shadow and about the edges of the room a host of drawn, tense faces and burning eyes. Never while they lived would ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... wasn't afeared of you at all, 'cept fer what you mought find out. You couldn't do no harm to nobody without a gun, and I knowed thar wasn't no still up that crick. I know—I knowed whar it was." Hale noticed the quick change of tense. ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... tightly pressed, opened her prayer book. Alison's lips were slightly parted as she gazed about her, across the aisle. Her experience of the Sunday before, deep and tense as it had been, seemed as nothing compared to this; the presence of all these people stimulated her inexpressibly, fired her; and she felt the blood pulsing through her body as she contrasted this gathering with the dignified, scattered congregation she had known. She scarcely recognized ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... period reflect the temper of two very different classes who were engaged in constant literary Party warfare. In the tense years which preceded the Literature Revolution the American people separated into two hostile parties: the Tories, or Loyalists, who supported the mother country; and the Whigs, or Patriots, who insisted on the right of the colonies to manage their own affairs, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of intimacy means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust. One might call it a social difference, for after all, the common socius of us all is the great universe whose children we are. If materialistic, we must be suspicious of this socius, cautious, tense, on guard. If spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the back is the next region treated. The patient lies prone, folding the arms under the head; a firm pillow is put under the epigastric region, so as to the better relax the back muscles, which are too tense when a person lies flat. Beginning from the occiput, both hands stroke firmly and rapidly downward and outward to the spines of the scapulae, at first lightly, then with increasing force. Then the whole back is vigorously rubbed—scrubbed one might call ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... all that I need to know. Common decency, it seems to me, might have suggested to you that you leave my child out of the list of women you have degraded. Since it has not, I merely wish to say to you"—and Mr. Haguenin's face was very tense and white—"that the relationship between you and me is ended. The one hundred thousand dollars you have indorsed for me will be arranged for otherwise as soon as possible, and I hope you will return to me the stock ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... so full of apparent good will, brought a quick flush of contrition to Mary's cheeks. She experienced a swift spasm of regret for her bitter suspicion of Marjorie. Her tense face softened. Why not unburden herself to her chum now and find relief from her torture ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... her to him—crushed her in upon the ache of his chest. His muscles set hard and unyielding; at that moment he was a tense, vivid body of flesh, without a mind; his blood, alive and conscious, running towards her. He remained perfectly still, locked about Helena, conscious ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... For one tense moment I thought the General would burst. By an effort he pulled himself together, however, and shouted to my troops in a voice ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... and thanked him for his expression, but there were things in the past which were not so easily wiped from the memory—especially a chafed ring around his left wrist, where the sheriff's iron had galled him when he had fretted against it during the tense moments ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... frost, your pulses beat, your cheeks glow, and a faint dew upon your forehead beneath your cap tells you that you are thoroughly warm. How the blood dances through the veins! How the eyes sparkle! How tense is every nerve! How strong each muscle! The ice looks like steel. Your skates are steel, and your legs feel the same as stroke, whish! stroke, whish! stroke! stroke! stroke! stroke! away you go, gathering power, velocity, confidence, delight, at the ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... streaming in at the window was to her eyes like the glare of the sun at noonday: the ticking of the clock on the wall fell on her ears, each tick like a sharply pointed hammer seeming to bruise the nerve. A keen thrill ran like a knife through her tense frame when the infant stirred and moaned in his sleep. The lion roused himself in an instant, and fixing his eyes upon the bed came towards it arching his back and yawning. He rubbed himself against the bedstead and stood for a moment so near that Mrs. V. could have touched him with her ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... able to see very little, so carefully do animals conceal themselves. In the night they emerge, and in the morning and evening there is a deafening din of insect life. But at noonday there is a soft and solemn hush, and we are tense with curiosity to know all that is going on in those mysterious forest depths and up among the tree-tops, so close but so impossible ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... into his stiff damask napkin, holding a fistful of it tense against bringing it down in a china-shivering bang. Then, with carefully spaced words, "If I didn't think, Bleema, that you are crazy for ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... internal condition in the living creature that is the most important single link in instinct. In the non-mating season the sight of the female has no effect on the male. But periodically his internal organs become tense with procreative cells; these change his coenaesthesia; that starts desire, and desire sets going the mechanisms of search, courtship, the sexual act and the care of the female while she is gravid. All instinctive acts have back of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... me showing 'em the way through the Narrers to ketch the Shark!" he growled; and he kept on his way till the imperative mood present tense was tried, and then he made for the side of the cutter, to receive what was to him a regular knock-down blow, or, as he put it, a wind taking him on a very ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... hazel bushes on the other side of the enclosure came an answer, a second neighing, deeper and fuller. The swampy ground of the enclosure shook, powerful hoofs scattered the stones, to right and left and a black stallion appeared at full gallop. The tense neck carried a magnificent head, the muscles lay like ropes under the glossy skin. As he caught sight of the mare, his eyes began to flash. He stopped and stretched out his neck as if he were going to yawn, raised his upper lip and showed his teeth. Then he galloped across ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... I grow up I'll have no nurse, Nor yet a governess; And lessons will not bother me When I grow up, I guess. I'll pay no heed to proper nouns, Nor yet to mood nor tense"— Here nurse put in: "When you grow up Let's hope ...
— Pages for Laughing Eyes • Unknown
... companions, are not so much adapted to the reading as to the writing of Latin. For instance, I remember (we will suppose) this sequence of 'tango tetigi' from the 'As in P.' Now, if I am reading Latin I meet either with the tense 'tango,' or the tense 'tetigi.' In the former case, I have no difficulty; for there is as yet no irregularity: and therefore it is impertinent to offer assistance: in the latter case I do find a difficulty, for, according to the models of verbs which I have ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... On the way they encounter various characters, some good and honourable, and others very much the reverse. Finally they arrive and set to work seeking for gold. Of course there are more adventures and tense situations, as you would ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... to him," Laura resumed, with the complacency of one who saw a goodly portion of the festival she was enjoying still before her. "I was going to say, Mr. Pericles had poor Mr. Pole in his power; has him, would be the correcter tense. And Wilfrid, as you may have heard, had really grossly insulted him, even to the extent of maltreating him—a poor foreigner—rich foreigner, if you like! but not capable of standing against a strong young man in wrath. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at home: He saw the hunter through the fence. "My friend," said he, "please wait; I'll be with you a moment hence, And fetch our porter of the gate." This porter was a dog immense, That left to wolves no future tense. Suspicion gave our Wolf a jog— It might not be so safely tamper'd. "My service to your porter dog," Was his reply, as off he scampered. His legs proved better than his head, And saved him life to ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... of the past tense, unintentional as it had been, told the story to the woman at once. "He is dead," she said. Then he took both her hands in his and looked into her face without speaking a word. And she gazed at him with fixed eyes, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... was cooler, steadier, now. The first great strain had subsided. He was cool, tense, now—though not a whit less determined ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... that's the reason I told you to take your seat, and left him in the corner. Remember that you are a stranger in the place, and they take more notice of what you do, so you must be careful. Now let's have our conjugations. Give me the verb 'to be,' potential mood, past perfect tense." ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... comes to some of us just once, but to all of us it comes. I stood with its spell upon me. Then I heard my voice, tense but ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... rose—with eyeballs tense, And swollen frontal veins: To all his powers of eloquence He gave the ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... dozen men in evening clothes were gathered watching with intent faces the spinning wheel. There was no money on the table, nothing but piles of chips of various denominations. Another thing that surprised me as I looked was that the tense look on the faces of the players was anything but the feverish, haggard gaze I had expected. In fact, they were sleek, well-fed, typical prosperous New-Yorkers rather inclined to the noticeable in dress and carrying their ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... his face pale but fixed in a stony calm. Looking at neither judge nor audience, but straight at his accuser, with eyes that were no longer the eyes that had dreamed upon the palms, so great and black they were and searching, he said, in a clear, tense voice, "I go to my death. It is useless to speak, for you have condemned me. But I cite you, Don Alonzo Morelos, to appear beside me at the bar of God, one year from my death-day, and testify how ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... There was a moment's tense silence while they told the victim what they had come for, and while the light of welcome in Stephen Marshall's eyes melted and changed into lightning. A dart of it went with a searching gleam out into the hall, and seemed to recognize Courtland as he stood idly smiling, ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... peace for a few minutes, coughing once or twice impatiently. He suspected that the extraordinary nature of this last tale, combined with the use of the future tense, had given rise to a taciturnity so unexpected in the warrior king. He therefore asked if Vikram the Brave would not like to hear another ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... and muscle was tense with expectation. The music of the hounds grew fainter. "Evidently circling again," I mused. I was getting to be quite a huntsman, and chuckled at how David Crocketty my ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... too dreadful, Jack," he said, in a low, shaking voice. "I see they mean it. There can be no possible doubt of that now." Then suddenly the note of his voice changed. It became tense, vibrating, eager. "What's that?" he said, and again, "What's that?" and ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... the quick assurance. "First I go to my cabin to mak' ready. In the morning I come here early an' say the au revoir. Then I go an' fin' M'sieu' Tom. You are satisfy?" His shrewd black eyes sought the approval of the trio of tense faces ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... interesting. Nearly everybody in this gallery, in fact, is of the interesting sort. At once it is apparent that there is nothing of the perfunctory here. Art is vital. Art is earnest. The atmosphere is tense. The young women are clad in a manner giving much freedom to the movement of their bodies. They walk with a stride. Their clothes are not of the mode of the Avenue, but they have—how shall I say? To twist what Whistler said of his model: Character, character is what these ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... disrepute. He resented the injustice of this, and all his old hatred of the law revived. Yet despite all logic of justice as against law—he could see Gary's hand clutching against his chest, his staring eyes, and the red ooze starting through those tense fingers—Pete reasoned that had he not been so skilled and quick with a gun, he would be in Gary's place now. As it was, he was alive and had a good ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... repeated, and, then, if Wapi could have understood, he would have noted the tense pallor of her lovely face and the look of a great fear that was away back in the staring blue ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood
... us embodied in the shape of a fidelity without fear and without reproach. Nearing the supreme moment of his life the Prince could only have had the feeling that it was about to end. He answered the questions put to him clearly, concisely—with the most profound indifference. After all those tense months of action, to talk was a weariness to him. But he concealed it, lest his foes should suspect in his manner the apathy of discouragement or the numbness of a crushed spirit. The details of his conduct could have no importance one way or another; with his thoughts these ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... non-religious. Their language hasn't instilled in them a predisposition to think of everything as the result of an action performed by an agent. And they have no definite parts of speech; any word can be used as any part of speech, depending on context. Tense is applied to words used as nouns, not words used as verbs; there are four tenses—spatial-temporal present, things here-and-now; spatial present and temporal remote, things which were here at some other time; spatial remote and temporal present, things existing now somewhere ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... grow.' The whole is cast into the form of history, and to begin the description with a future tense is not only an error in grammar but gratuitously introduces an incongruity. The word rendered 'tender plant' means a sucker, and 'root' probably would more properly be taken as a shoot from a root, the tree having been felled, and nothing left but the stump. There is here, then, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... forever making the ball imitate or caricature humanity, or beguiling the players to act like solemn automata. For children are usually quicker than grown-ups to see these droll resemblances. I came by degrees to like the game's variety, its tense excitement, its beauty of posture and curve. And before long I vaguely felt what I later learned consciously: that tennis is a sure revealer of character. Three sets with a man suffice to give one ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... "I don't think I'll croak you," and he slipped the revolver into his pocket while Spike watched him in sudden tense eagerness. ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... this sector developed to unexpected strength. On the 17th Falkenhayn succeeded in squeezing himself through Gyimes Pass and reaching Agas, seven miles inside the frontier. At about the same time strong fighting began in the Red Tower Pass. The battle was, indeed, raging at a tense heat up and down the whole front. It was now becoming obvious that the Central Powers had determined to make an example of Rumania and punish her "treachery," as they called it, even though they must suspend activity in every other theater of the war to do so. Not a little anxiety was caused in the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... reciprocal. She had sacrificed herself to him; therefore he had sacrificed himself to her. A halo of mysterious sanctity hung about her obligations to him, and seemed to forbid too close an analysis of their nature. An old conjugation of the indicative mood, present tense, backed by the third person singular's capital, floated justifications from Holy Writ of the worst stereotyped iniquity ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... they were now; she knelt on her knees in ignorant suspense. Slowly and with a patient force Rudolf began to work his enemy's arms towards one another. Rupert had read his design in his eyes and resisted with tense muscles. It seemed as though his arms must crack; but at last they moved. Inch by inch they were driven closer; now the elbows almost touched; now the wrists joined in reluctant contact. The sweat broke out on the count's brow, ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the guest, for in Chichikov's face there dawned a sort of tense expression, and it reddened as though its owner were striving to express something not easy to put into words. True enough, Manilov was now destined to hear such strange and unexpected things as never before had greeted ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver interspaces, and all that tense silence of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... ore, se esse mortuum Mundo: tamen edit eximie pecus, bibit Non pessime, stertit sepultum crapula, Operam veneri dat, et voluptatum assecla Est omnium. Idne est mortuum esse mundo? Aliter interpretare. Mortui sunt Hercule Mundo cucullati, quod inors tense sunt onus, Ad rem utiles nullam, nisi ad scelus ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... lithe liquid ease, he was on his feet, body tense, alert. Her form was vaguely familiar as she ran toward him. She dodged from his sight, then re-appeared as the winding path ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... moment, and they watched him. First he walked slowly towards the Houssa sentry, who shouldered his arms in salute. Bones halted before the soldier and stared at him. Somehow, the watchers on the stoep knew that he was staring—there was something so fixed, so tense in his attitude. Then, without warning, the sentry's hand passed across his body, and the rifle came down ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... replied Ralph. His tone was tense, and he showed that he was disturbed. He was too quick a thinker not to at once comprehend the vital issue of the present incident. With Fogg headed down the track towards him from the ditch, trying to overtake the train, ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... exciting process of becoming a great architect. And he knew and felt that he was. And the disordered bed, and the untransparent bath-water, and the soap-tin by the side of the bath, and the breakfast-tray on a chair, were as much a part of the inspiring spectacle as himself tense and especially dandiacal ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... of their anger still clung to the spot where the bungalow had stood. Behind her, there were lights in a dozen rooms of the chateau. She knew that she was not the only sleepless one. Others were lying wide awake and tense, but for reasons scarcely akin to hers; ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the past tense, not because she is dead, but because times and circumstances have changed since the period when we both had to do with the Uninhabited House, and she has altered in consequence—one of the most original people who ever ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... sterns their captains glitter afar, beautiful in gold and purple; the rest of the crews are crowned with poplar sprays, and their naked shoulders glisten wet with oil. They sit down at the thwarts, and their arms are tense on the oars; at full strain they wait the signal, while throbbing fear and heightened ambition drain their riotous blood. Then, when the clear trumpet-note rang, all in a moment leap forward from their line; the shouts of the sailors strike up ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... and even to imitate his manners and dress and gait, for very loyalty and devotion. Anthony could not take his eyes off him; he watched the clear-cut profile of his face thrown fearlessly forward, waited in tense expectation to hear him speak, and paid no attention to the whisperings of the chaplain ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... done this, but his boyish love for the girls and their boat could not be restrained. Then they waved, and the maroon and white flag stood out tense and defiant ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... of mind was constantly on the increase. Still, it is true, she wrote to disciples near and far long, tender letters of spiritual counsel—analyses of the religious life tranquilly penetrating as those of an earlier time. But her political correspondence grew in bulk. It is tense, nervous, virile. It breathes a vibrating passion, a solemn force, that are the index of a breaking heart. Not for one moment did Catherine relax her energies. From 1376, when she went to Avignon, she led, with one or two brief intermissions ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... fingers down the tense muscles, then up to the manly shoulder-blades. "Why, boy, you are built like an ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... her as she lay on the floor and held her head in his trembling hands. At last she made a slight movement. He helped her raise the upper part of her body and supported her. She brushed her disheveled hair from her face and looked about her. Her gaze was such a strange tense one that Valentine's fear increased. She nodded her head and said in a low voice, "Yes!" Valentine knew that she was saying to herself that she had really heard the terrible news and had not dreamed it. She sat for a long time motionless, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... real crisis, a definite transaction, a point of time as clear as the morning dawn. It is not an everlasting dying and an eternal struggle to live. But it is all expressed in a tense that denotes definiteness, fixedness and finished action. We actually died at a certain point and as actually began ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... the past year again showed the value of the United Nations in bringing about the peaceful adjustment of tense international controversies. In Indonesia and in Palestine the efforts of the United Nations have put a stop to bloodshed and paved the way ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... moment he seemed stunned but he tightened his arms about her, and tense the answer came. "I can't do without you, Belle, I can't do without you. I've given you my word. I take you on ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... causes, we must be satisfied with the fact—he wore a wig; and, in the distraction of mental perplexity, when Monsieur Cherfeuil was essaying to get the poet out of the absent into the conditional mood, the man of verse, staring abstractedly upon the man of tense, would thrust his hand under his peruke, and rub, rub, rub his polished scalp, which all the while effused a divine ichor—(poets never perspire)—and, when he was gently reminded that his wig was a little awry towards the left side, he would pluck it, resentfully, equally as much ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... years ago, women were going to orthopedic surgeons to have corrected. In this attitude the line passing through the centre of gravity strikes the heels, the knees are hyper-extended, and the muscles of the calves and thighs are rendered tense. ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... era in their love. It was an inspired whirl of two lovers, whose feet hardly felt the ground, and whose hearts bounded and thrilled, and their cheeks glowed, and their eyes shot fire; and when Grace was obliged to stop, because the others stopped, her elastic and tense frame turned supple and soft directly, and she still let her eyes linger on his, and her hand nestle in his a moment: this, and a faint sigh of pleasure and tenderness, revealed how sweet her partner ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... we were not sufficiently acquainted with it to know; but it is certainly very imperfect, for it is almost totally without inflexion, both of nouns and verbs. Few of the nouns have more than one case, and few of the verbs more than one tense; yet we found no great difficulty in making ourselves mutually understood, however strange it may ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... anxious eyes, below a hedge of rifle barrels slanted towards the north. The Philosopher had jerked out of slumber into a wakefulness like mine. He rubbed his eyes and then sat bolt upright, with a tense searching look, as though trying to pierce to the truth of things by a ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... bower in haste Ran trembling: spell-bound there, before her bridal-bed She stood, while wan smiles flickered, like the northern dawn, Across her worn cheeks' ice-field; keenest memories then Rushed with strong shudderings through her—as the winged shaft Springs from the tense nerve, so her passion hurled her forth Sweeping, like fierce ghost, on through hall and corridor, Tearless, with wide eyes staring, while a ghastly wind Moaned on through roof and rafter, and the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year[2] exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Semitic language, the ancient language of the Jews, and that in which the Old Testament is written, the words of which, as indeed of others of the same stock, are derived from triliteral roots, and the verb in which has no present tense, only a past and a future, convertible, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... three in the morning, he was so tense and animate that he heard the soft, swift tread of a Chinese in the hall and the faintest possible rustle of a paper thrust under his door. He waited a moment before turning on the light.... It was another missive from ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... you, you young chump! Go on." A moment of silence, while Mrs. McChesney's face smiled and glowed like a girl's as she listened to the voice of her son. Then suddenly glow and smile faded. She grew tense. Her head, that had been leaning so carelessly on the hand that held the receiver, came up with a jerk. "Jock McChesney!" she gasped, ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... young body was strained to catch a glimpse of one familiar figure. She had little difficulty in singling him out from the rest. He had stripped off his sweater and stood with head well down, his great limbs tense, straining for the word to spring. Anna's breath came quickly, as if she had been running, the roses that he had sent her heaved with the tumult in her breast. It seemed to her as if she must cry out with the delight of ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... and standing on the terrace was a tall, thin man wearing a light coat over evening dress. He looked pale, gaunt, and unshaven, and although the regard of his light eyes was almost dreamy, there was something very tense in ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the reader must indulge me in a long parenthesis. I beg him to bear me witness that I never made one before. This parenthesis is on the tense that I am obliged to use in sending to the press these minutes. The reader observes that the last transactions mentioned happen in April and May, 1871. Those to be narrated are the sequence of those already told. Speaking of them in 1870 with the coarse tenses of the English language is very ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... at his shoulder as Thaddeus hunched over the table just as he had done the previous day. From time to time she glanced at her watch. The maze of clay strips grew and as Funston finished shaping the other half hemisphere of clay, she broke the tense silence. ...
— A Filbert Is a Nut • Rick Raphael
... what a mess I made of it! No, Sally, there's no such person. Now I shall have to speak the truth, and then I shall have to go away from you, and it will all be spoiled...." But Sally interposes on the tense speech, and sound of growing ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... results of trade. That he is not a business man—and a successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... more. She arose, the tears blinding her, and slipped quietly out. She had seen Jean looking over the gallery railing with serious eyes, and Stuart standing by a pillar with a group of fellow-students, his face pale and tense. She dared not risk meeting them or anyone else she knew. She hurried down the stairs and out along the street struggling for her self-control. Half consciously her footsteps turned in the direction of that little street where she had seen the girl that looked like Eppie. The ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Spartan. Every outward chance, so many an anxious heart told itself, favoured the oft-victorious giant; but then,—and here came reason for a true Hellene,—"the gods could not suffer so fair a man to meet defeat." The noonday sun beat down fiercely. The tense stillness was now and then broken by the bawling of a swarthy hawker thrusting himself amid the spectators with cups and a jar of sour wine. There was a long rest. The trainers came forward again and dusted the two remaining champions with sand that they might ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... kick-off, and Tom relieved Gafferty. The coaches raged and urged, the rival captains scolded and implored and the quarters danced around and acted like wild-men. And then, suddenly, the ball was seized, a whistle blew and it was all over. And the panting players, tense of face, dripping with perspiration, drew apart to view each other at first scowlingly and then with slowly spreading grins, taking toll of their own injuries ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... sat there for several tense minutes, each one almost holding his breath in the effort to train his ears so as not to miss the ...
— Chums of the Camp Fire • Lawrence J. Leslie
... a low, tense voice, "you love Lola! I know you do. Then will you, for her sake, reply to me openly and frankly? Have you in these past few days met a bald-headed Italian named Luigi ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... The tense eagerness in his voice might have warned her, were it not that she was shocked by the bitterness which welled up in her heart. She was amazed by this introspective glimpse; it alarmed her; she must convince herself, at all costs, that she ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... his lips when there came the sound of a chair being quickly pushed back, and Oliver stood beside Margaret. His eyes were flashing; his right shirt-cuff was rolled back, the bit of charcoal still between his fingers. Every muscle of his body was tense with anger. Margaret's quick instinct took in the situation at a glance. She saw Oliver's wrath ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... throb came up from below, instead of the swift thud-thud of the screw that had pounded for many weeks. It was late; so late that most of the ship's lights were extinguished. But all through her was a feeling of pulsating life, of unrest, of a kind of tense excitement, of long-pent expectation. There were low voices everywhere; feet paced the decks; along the port railings on each deck soldiers were clustered thickly, looking out across the grey, tossing sea to a winking light that flashed and twinkled ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... great circumambient Power grew upon him at each instant, sacramentalized, it seemed, by the solemn evening light, and evoked by this tense ardour of half a million souls, and focused behind him in one ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... of girls. Girls in smocks of "artistic" shades—bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending violet; girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, is usually either arranged in a wildly natural bird's-nest mass, or boldly clubbed after the fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; girls with tense little faces, slender arms and an astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And men who, for the most part, are too busy with their ideals to cut their hair; men whose collars may be low and rolling, or high and bound with black silk stocks after the ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... change and sport and pure air, he told himself, but it was hardly to be expected that he should do more. He yawned, dozed, and surveyed his line without curiosity; beside him sat "Mistah Breckenridge," every muscle of him tense, and a light in his eyes that ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... flickered and went out I grasped the shotgun which I had laid at my side and actually turned the muzzle in the direction of the now invisible entrance, my thumb on one of the hammers, ready to cock the piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid and tense. But later I laid down the weapon with a sense of shame and mortification. What did I fear, and why?—I, to whom the night ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Kinnaird, lying flat down, held out his hand, and in a moment or two Weston and the girl stood with the others close beneath the rock. He did not know how they got there. He was quivering all through, and the perspiration of tense effort dripped from him. While he stood there gasping, the packet of provisions, which had apparently rested for a few moments among the gravel dislodged by his efforts to climb up, rolled down the slope, and he watched it rush downward until he turned his eyes away. It was ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... her what I think of her," breathed Jane in a low, tense voice, shaking a clenched first "Oh, wouldn't I ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... these must have their dates affixed to them. And for sake of uniformity I have dated all the others, and, doing so, have thought I need not exclude all such topical remarks as in them too were uttered, nor throw into a past tense such of those remarks as I have retained. Perhaps a book of essays ought to seem as if it had been written a few days before publication. On the other hand—but this is a Note, not a ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... me quitaba a m esa nia; there are two idiomatic uses in this phrase: 1. cualquiera in an ironic sense nadie (a frequent use); 2. quitaba quitara, a substitution of tense often found in the main clause of a contrary to fact, ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... is so fragrant and strange between the fronting rows of shacks is simply that of the forest: inept the woodsman who would not recognize it at once. The silence is a forest silence, and if the air is tense and electric, it is because certain wilderness forces that no white man can name but which surely dwell in the darker thickets have risen ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... evening—for he did not intend to expose himself primarily and his men in the second place, to the accurate gun of Red Jim in broad daylight—was a comfortable stretch in which to make the journey to the shack on the mountain-side. Like a good general, he kept the minds of his followers from growing tense by deftly turning the talk, on the way, to other topics, as they swung off the east trail towards Glosterville and journeyed due north over the rolling foothills. There was only one chance in three that he could have deceived the girl by his first direction, but that chance ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... driven, according to the opinion of Dr. Lowth: at the same time it may be observed, 1. that this is in many cases only an ellipsis of the letter n at the end of the word; as froze, for frozen; wove, for woven; spoke, for spoken; and that then the participle accidentally becomes similar to the past tense: 2. that the language seems gradually tending to omit the letter n in other kind of words for the sake of euphony; as housen is become houses; eyne, eyes; thine, thy, &c. and in common conversation, the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... away her tears, she fixed upon her father-in-law eyes full of tears, vindictive, squinting with wrath; her face and neck were red and tense, and she was shouting at ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... closely by Careni-Amori and Olga Obosky, and at some distance by the whispering, gesticulating Jews. The great soprano was profoundly agitated. Obosky, a pace or two behind her, was tense and silent. Her head was slightly bent. There was a strange, dog-like expression in her eyes as they regarded the back of ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the shut-in staircase and carefully unlocked its narrow door. But by the time I had reached the fourth floor, and unlocked, with the same key, the only other door that had a streak of light under it, I had gained a certain degree of tense composure born of the desperate nature of the occasion. The calmness with which I pushed open the door proved this—a calmness which made the movement noiseless, which was the reason, I suppose, why I was enabled to suppress the shriek that rose to my lips as I saw that the room had occupants, ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... German; this language, also, having its grammar and its pronunciation, to be conquered or acquired only by persistence in irksome exercise—an error in a form being as entirely and simply an error as a mistake in a tense, and an ill-drawn line as reprehensible as a ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... Gellius, (Noctes Atticae, vi. 17,) Ammianus Marcellinua, (xxii. 16,) and Orosius, (l. vi. c. 15.) They all speak in the past tense, and the words of Ammianus are remarkably strong: fuerunt Bibliothecae innumerabiles; et loquitum ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... this as he knelt in the stern of his little craft and plied the paddle slowly and with infinite caution, his every nerve tense, and sight and hearing strained to catch any sound of movement on the rapidly nearing point. Were it white men only that they were seeking to elude, he would have felt far less apprehension, but he recognized that in the ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... write a letter. One couldn't write out there, though it was so nice in other respects: the table refused to stand firm. They too then had pretexts of letters between them—I judged this a token that the situation was tense. It was the only one nevertheless that Linda gave: like Archie she was young enough to carry it off. She had been used to seeing us always together, yet she made no comment on my having come over without him. I waited in vain for her to speak of this—it would only be natural; ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... different from their present significance. Among such lapses in syntax we find the slight confusion of tenses in the first stanza, caused in the poet's mind by the necessity of making a rhyme for France, though this might have been obviated by writing "stands" for "stood" and using the present tense throughout. The necessities of rhyme troubled Drayton not a little: he must pronounce "Agincourt" as it is written to rhyme with "sort," which, by the way, is not a perfect rhyme for "fort" in the sixth stanza, and "great" does not rhyme with "seat" nor "feat"; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... human reasoning, there was no earthly necessity for any delay upon the part of the attacking Apaches, and yet, for full an hour longer, they maneuvered and reconnoitered, without striking a blow. Despite the tense condition of the lad's nerves, he began to grow drowsy and weary at the prolonged delay, and had the attack been deferred a short time longer, he would have ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... had happened, Bob seized a coil of rope, made one end fast to the stern of his boat, grasped the coil in his right hand, and, tense and expectant, scanned the sea for the ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... standing radiant before us, illuminated and transfigured by the halo streaming round him. A huge man, towering far above his fellows; with Herculean shoulders, deep chest, broad back, sturdy neck, brawny arms, and massive fists; a being with vast muscle and tense nerve; of choicest make, and finest tone and temper,—robust and fine, bulky and sinewy, ponderous and agile, stalwart and elastic; a hammer to give, and a rock to receive blows; with the light tread of the deer, and the fell paw of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... William Perry Peters, and I feel a poignant sense Of grief that I'm unable to employ the present tense; But Providence disposes, be our scheming what it may, And disposed of Mr. Peters in a ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... was growing uncomfortable. Amy kept casting frightened glances at her sister's white, tense face. "Oh, dear," she sighed, finally, "if this had only been in a story it wouldn't have ended so dreadfully. Something nice would have happened just at the last minute to make up for ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, tense, tension, pretence, intense, intensive, ostensible, tent, tenterhook, portent, attention, intention, tenuous, attenuate, extenuate, antenna, tone, tonic, standard. The form of the key-syllable for the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... He spoke in a tense whisper, so low that I could hardly understand him with his mouth against my ear, so full of terror that the tone of it startled ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... and its occupant after the murder. The actor had long before become again Shakespeare's Othello. We had seen him tortured, racked, and played upon by the malignant Iago; seen him, while perplexed in the extreme, irascible, choleric, sullen, morose; but now, as with tense nerves we waited for the catastrophe, he was truly formidable. The great tragedy moved on. Desdemona's piteous entreaties had been choked in her slim throat, the smothering pillow held in place with merciless strength. Then at Emilia's disconcerting knock and demand for admission, ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... will not be certain until the chancelleries of Europe have given up their secrets, if certain then; but, whatever the motive, all the world outside Germany has agreed that had she willed she could have averted the fatal ending of those tense days ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... finished the sentence, all about them Arrillians had prostrated themselves in the rather dirty street, covering their faces with their hands, lying face down. The Earthmen hesitated a moment, and a priest of Arrill appeared as though from nowhere, a wicked scimitar-like weapon in his hand and a face tense ...
— Grove of the Unborn • Lyn Venable
... watch, saw what had become of his time-values (he had taken hours for minutes—not, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... of relief that her craze—if it was a craze—went to the visionary side of her own unworthiness, and was not due to any knowledge of his misdemeanors, as she might think them. "Do not speak. I have to tell you. I had forgotten it," she went on to say in the same tense, compressed manner—the manner of one who has a task to get through, and has gathered all her strength for the effort, leaving none to be squandered in emotion—"I was so happy in these last days I had forgotten it. Now I have remembered, and we ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... man, his voice a tense whisper in the musty cell. "I mean that right now you are practically dead. You may not know it, but you are. You walk into a newly opened planet with your smart little bag of tricks, walk in here with a shaky passport and no permit, with no knowledge of the natives outside of ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... tones—a woman's voice! At the same time he felt the bow of the canoe pulled in against the bank. Before he could recover sufficiently from his surprise to speak she had stepped aboard and he could hear her adjusting a cushion beneath her knees. Then came her tense whispered warning: ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... check showed the crew at their stations, the torpedo hatches clear, the antiradiation shields up and the ship in fighting trim. I stole a quick glance at Chase. Sweat stood out on his gray forehead. His lips were drawn back into a thin line, showing his teeth. His face was tense, but whether with fear ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... you, we will skip hntal, and also for the present verbs of the first conjugation, and proceed to the second. Belle, I will now select for you to conjugate the prettiest verb in Armenian; not only of the second, but also of all the four conjugations; that verb is siriel. Here is the present tense: siriem, siries, sire, siriemk, sirek, sirien. You observe that it runs on just in the same manner as hntal, save and except that e is substituted for a; and it will be as well to tell you that almost the only difference between the second, third, and fourth conjugations, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed important in the {Real World}. See also {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, {tense}. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... him, upon the dais whereon sat the King, with the Earl of Mackworth standing at his right hand, the Comte de Vermoise upon the left, and the others ranged around and behind the throne. It was with the same tense feeling of dreamy unreality that Myles walked slowly up the length of the hall, measuring his steps by those of Gascoyne. Suddenly he felt Lord George Beaumont touch him lightly upon the arm, and almost instinctively ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... almost stunned. The blood rushed in a tumultuous flood to his thin cheeks, then receded, leaving his face mottled red and white. His steel-gray eyes suddenly glowed like hot metal. There was a moment of tense silence; then he said, his voice steady and controlled, his manner stiff but not without dignity, "Pray do not allow that to discompose you. She is ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... More than once had Bud Lee felt that he was falling only to catch his balance and come back at Trevors; more than once had Trevors gone reeling backward, smashing into the wall. Many a time did Melvin count his money won and lost. And Carson, crouching now, tense, eager, a little fearful, muttered ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when you undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to succeed. Your confidence oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly demoralized into a jerky and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his eyes from Van Meter after his first assault they rested on the face of Kate Ransom, her magnificent figure tense, rigid, her cheeks scarlet, her blue eyes flashing with tears of excitement. She was stirred to her soul's depths, and no figure in all the throbbing crowd gave to the speaker such inspiring response. Her face flashed back ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the rich young voice of our passenger, whom we'd half forgotten in our tense scanning of the horizon. Charlie and I both turned to him together in surprise—and his face certainly betrayed the confusion of one who has let something ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... enclosure came an answer, a second neighing, deeper and fuller. The swampy ground of the enclosure shook, powerful hoofs scattered the stones, to right and left and a black stallion appeared at full gallop. The tense neck carried a magnificent head, the muscles lay like ropes under the glossy skin. As he caught sight of the mare, his eyes began to flash. He stopped and stretched out his neck as if he were going to yawn, raised his upper lip and showed his teeth. ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... not half a dozen yards away, and was coming nearer. No one but Virginia suspected evil. She alone had felt the thrill of a murderer's nerves, the tense spring of his muscles. She alone guessed what the roll of ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... thought folks looked down on me for it, even when they didn't seem to intend to do it. But I guess it isn't so bad as I thought when I first began to notice it. Do you suppose it is?" His voice was suddenly tense with personal interest in the question which had ceased ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... swerved toward me. She had quite taken the breath out of him. I knew just what to do in that moment of time she had gained. I leaped to meet her, catching her about the waist and holding on hand and foot—yes, by my feet; I could hold on by them as readily as by my hands. I could feel in my tense grip the pull of the hair as her skin and her muscles ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... divers paths asunder. Like as cranes Deserting frozen Strymon for the streams Of Nile, when winter falls, in casual lines Of wedge-like figures (34) first ascend the sky; But when in loftier heaven the southern breeze Strikes on their pinions tense, in loose array Dispersed at large, in flight irregular, They wing their journey onwards. Stronger winds With day returning blew the navy on, Past Lissus' shelter which they vainly sought, Till bare to northern blasts, Nymphaeum's port, But safe in southern, gave the fleet repose, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Harriet Prescott Spofford, is a work of unique quality, being really a poem in the guise of a prose novel. The thought is tense and sublimated, and the style glowing, musical and polished. There is abundant invention in the story, and nothing of common-place and indolent imitation which in the case of ordinary raconteurs contributes so largely to swell the bulk of results. The narrative fascinates one, but ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... is by leading the herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... moment of swift fear. And then, the mighty roar of the waters; the mad plunging of the scow between the towering walls of rock; the set, tense face of Vermilion as he stared into the gloom; the laboured breathing of the scowmen as they strained at the sweeps, veering the scow to the right, or to the left, as the rod of the pilot indicated; the splendid battle of it; ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... ago, (I am speaking of the 25th of March, A. D. 1839, in the present tense,) I succeeded in persuading my father to gratify my predilection for the sea, by putting me on board of the Gentile, under the particular care of Captain Smith, to try one voyage—so I became the ship's cousin. Contrary to the predictions of my friends, I ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... was added to Grant's lengthening score of brilliant victories; and again, as at Donelson and at Vicksburg, he had been the instrument of relieving a tense oppression of anxiety that had settled upon the nation. Sherman, with two corps, was at once sent to the relief of Knoxville; but Longstreet, having heard of Bragg's defeat, made an unsuccessful assault and retreated into Virginia. By the administration in Washington, and by the people ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen
... coals of the little fire to sizzle and smoke. The cry of the wolves had floated—but this new cry seemed to hurl itself through the night—a terrifying crescendo of noise that sounded at once a challenge and wail. For a full minute after the sound ceased the boy sat tense and motionless, staring wide-eyed beyond the fire, while behind him, in the farthest corner of the tent the malamutes huddled and whined. Then he shook himself and laughed. "Some howl!" he muttered, "I bet they heard that in Ten Bow. ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him—the arrangements with his locum tenens, the interview with the bishop, the parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be done with Martha ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ennuye beyond my usual tense of that yawning verb, which I am always conjugating; and I don't find that society much mends the matter. I am too lazy to shoot myself—and it would annoy Augusta, and perhaps * *; but it would be a good thing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... She became tense again. She heard the slip-slip of sandals In the corridor, a key turn in the lock. The door opened, and in the dim light she ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... at his desk in the rear drawing a cheque to pay for some cotton he had bought from a farmer. Dixie walked straight toward him, but Henley did not see her till she was quite close, then he was struck by the unusual pallor and tense gravity of her face. He sprang up at once and ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... strange, tense voice, "you are mad. You do not know what you ask. Virginia is not for such as you. Tell me that she does not know of your feelings toward her. Tell me that she does not reciprocate your love. Tell me the truth, man." Professor Maxon seized von Horn roughly by both ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of her voice, tense and authoritative, came through the slit of the window and thrilled him. 'All is well now, but I will send you ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... said Margaret at last, turning to him, and speaking more quietly, but still in a kind of tense way, 'then, when 'Lias wor took bad, yo know, Davy, I had my boys. Did yo ever hear tell o' what came to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... prophet may Adopt their graphic present tense, I would remark—and so forestall A truth they'll never dare to trench on— There is no Hindenburg at all, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... impatiently, but made no answer. From the moment Hanson had spoken he had assumed an air of immobile and concentrated attention, tense as that of an Indian listening and sighting in a forest, or of a ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... Bob the atmosphere was tense with excitement. The very calm of the evening was unnatural. He felt as though lightnings should be flashing, ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... for a moment or two, but stood tense and strained. His eyes, his whole attitude showed excitement, ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... secondary stresses with an intensity of hatred and bitterness that takes shape in a following series of peculiar falling rhythm waves, each one of which has a foam-covered crest 'white as the bitten lip of hate.' This rhythm, curling, hissing, tense, topful of venom, Alecto's serpents coiling and twisting through it, makes one of the most awful passages ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... as before in the maelstrom of air back of the ship. But the muffled roar was changed, punctured with a machine-gun's familiar rattle, and the stabbing flashes from Blake's ship before he threw it out of the other's path were a song of joy to the tense nerves of the men ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... while women embraced in their tears. The tense strain was over, for willing hands had clutched the lines after Paul's weight had brought the wild runaway to a staggering halt; and ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... appropriate case, and as well as of, to, and from, we should have a case for deatas rumah, on top of the house. So of verbs: kallo saya buli jalan, If I could walk: this may be termed the preter-imperfect tense of the subjunctive or potential mood of the verb jalan; whereas it is in fact a sentence of which jalan, buli, etc. are constituent words. It is improper, I say, to talk of the case of a noun which does not change its termination, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... possible that she was led astray by a will-o'-the-wisp, which has often misled artists not of the very first class—the chance of an easy contrast. The light-hearted, light-minded Erfeuil was to set off the tense and serious Nelvil—a type again, as he was evidently intended to be, but a somewhat new type of Englishman. She was a devotee of Rousseau, and she undoubtedly had the egregious Bomston before her. But, though her sojourn in ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of a shock to realise that an event which has been dreaded for days has at last arrived. During that tense moment wherein the blue-stockinged Briggs had cuddled the ball into position on the tee Clint had experienced just such a shock. Only yesterday the Claflin game had been of the future, only this morning he had still viewed it uneasily as a ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... these circumstances the relations between Great Britain and the United States had become tense and strained. The provincial officers at Quebec and the Indian partisans at Detroit quickly echoed the mood of the home government. In the event of a new war, England could again command the savage allies and ravage the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... at Von Gerhard in the light of the street lamp I saw a tense, drawn look about the little group of muscles which show when the teeth are set hard. When he spoke those muscles had ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... so quiet, and I had such a tense feeling inside of me that I couldn't say a word, and didn't want to anyway. The fingers of one of Mr. Black's hands were sort of drumming on the desk, and he was looking at something in the very front of the Bible in the place where people nearly always write their names, ...
— Shenanigans at Sugar Creek • Paul Hutchens
... landmarks, in the course of a journey, are more frequently observed and noted as landmarks, when looking back along the journey, than when actually passing them. They belong generically to the past tense; one rarely says, "This is a landmark"; usually "That ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... averted from the single tell-tale sauce-pan upon the fire, over which Madge Hildreth had bent with sudden color, fell to bustling about with a queer lump in his throat and talking ambiguously of Aunt Ellen's Christmas orders, painfully conscious that the girl's dark face had grown pitifully white and tense and that Roger's wan little face was glowing. And when the fire was damped by the Doctor himself, and his Christmas guests hustled into dazed, protesting readiness, the Doctor deftly muffled the thin little fellow ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple
... not fired again, could not. With a quick, frantic wrench and twist Chris had knocked the gun from his hand, and it had slithered away, now lost in the bunching smoke. But Istafiev's other hand, steel-ribbed with tense muscles, had darted like a snake into the American's throat, and under that iron, relentless grip Chris was weakening. His head was whirling; the old wound throbbing waves of nausea through him. Desperately he tried to struggle loose, flailing with his legs—but useless. ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... reply to this; and for another long minute Susan sat tense and motionless, watching the boy's face. Then, with almost a guilty look over ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... with one eye at the slight opening gained a glimpse of the lighted room beyond. A moment, motionless, he stared in on the scene; then straightened up, and, with revolver in hand, signalled to the others to close in closer. They stood there for a tense instant, poised and eager; then the doors were flung crashing back, and they leaped recklessly forward, out of the darkness into the light. It was a furious fight—sharp, merciless, uncompromising. The thieves, startled, desperate, were hurled back by the first rush against the further ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... you when I can speak of it. But it was not wrong in itself, or in the eyes of God or man!' The old woman said not a word. No word was needed, for had she not already expressed her belief? But Stephen felt her relief in the glad pressure of her finger-tips. In a voice less strained and tense ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... face, and the dead weight of sorrow settled like lead, the heavier, upon his heart. Too well he knew the dangers of the desert. He could almost read Gardley's fears in the white, drawn look about his lips, the ashen circles under his eyes, the tense, strained pose of his whole figure. Gardley's mind was urging ahead of his steed, and his body could not relax. He was anxious to go a little faster, yet his judgment knew it would not do, for his horse would play out before he could get another. They ate their corn bread in the saddle, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... over the whole abdomen; cardialgia, nausea, vomiting of all solid and liquid aliments, and during the empty state of the stomach, violent efforts to vomit occurring at irregular intervals; abdomen tense and tympanitic; violent intermittent pain along the course of the intestines; constipation; sensation of fatigue and lassitude in the lumbar region and in the extremities; dragging pains in the inter-scapular region; extinction ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... he said, in a low, shaking voice. "I see they mean it. There can be no possible doubt of that now." Then suddenly the note of his voice changed. It became tense, vibrating, eager. "What's that?" he said, and again, "What's that?" ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... might be killed at any moment. But great as the strain must have been, Spugg went up and down to his office and in and out of the club without a tremor. The situation gave him a new importance in our eyes, something tense. ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... look back at tiny Margaret MacLean and see her very clearly as she straightened up in the little iron crib and answered in a shrill, tense voice: "I'm not Thumbkin. I'm a foundling. I don't belong to anybody. I never had any father or mother or nothing, but just a hurt back; they said so. They stood right there—two of them; and one told the ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... came the sound of a shot. Downey straightened, and for the space of minutes stood tense as a pointer. The sound was not repeated—and swiftly the officer of the ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... bench, peering over the shoulders of the crowd. Prince Ferdinand William Otto saw him, and bent forward. "There he is!" he said, in a tense tone. ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... soldiers, laborers, servants, white faces, black faces, yellow faces, brown faces, straight hair, curly hair, and kinky hair, French, Spaniards, Portuguese, Indians, negroes, and many mixtures, every one eager and tense, and every eye bent upon Paul who stood, back to the gate, holding the sword in his hand, but unconscious ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... moment had gone, she rose and walked down the aisle. It was very hard to go away tonight. There had been all the time the fear that what happened the night before would happen again—that she would not see Howie, after all. That made her so tense that she was exhausted now. And then "munitions"—and "scrap-heap." Perhaps it was because of all this that tonight her moment had been so brief. Only for an instant Howie's smile had brought her into life. It was gone now. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of which had made him shudder. When he noticed the crowd, he gasped. He recovered from his astonishment quickly, however. He opened his mantle, showing his gaunt, powerful form. He raised his head and faced the crowd. His face, strong and sunburned, was tense and drawn for a moment; then it relaxed. Deep lines, expressing severe pain, were furrowed in ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... boring a hole with the toe of his boot down through the soft grass sod, while he seemed to study the cobbler's handiwork. After a few moments of tense silence, he looked ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... year again showed the value of the United Nations in bringing about the peaceful adjustment of tense international controversies. In Indonesia and in Palestine the efforts of the United Nations have put a stop to bloodshed and paved the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... she repeated in the same tense whisper, "you must—oh, you must! I've heard he has killed a man ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... you let me have it," she said, soothingly; and by dint of further coaxing, she pulled the money from the old lady's tense fingers. There were nine dollars in crisp new bills. Amanda sat looking at them ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... once, was revealed to me the cause and object of all this gaggle, and confusion, and outcry. It was revealed to the crowd, too, that stood about me, and, in the revelation, the noise of its mouthing went off and faded, till a tense silence reigned and the murmur of ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... fellow to utter the slightest sound, and thus locked together, the three went down in a bunch under the impetus of the sudden attack, the jailer being undermost. The hard pavement seemed to fairly ring with the violent impact of the man's skull upon it, and the next instant Dick felt the fellow's tense muscles relax as though the violence of the blow had either partially or wholly stunned him, whereupon the youngster, still acting upon an impulse that seemed to emanate from somewhere outside himself, pushed Phil on one side, flung himself in a kneeling posture upon the prostrate jailer's ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... face. A second he remained thus; then, going swiftly to the door, he opened it, and stood listening, followed by the surprised glances of the assembled company. But it needed not the warning cry with which he turned, to afford them the explanation of his odd behaviour. In the moment's tense silence that had followed his sudden opening of the door they had caught from without the distant fall of ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... bewildered for a moment, and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... have endeavoured to deserve well of their country, by writing honor and labor for honour and labour, red for read in the preter-tense, sais for says, repete tor repeat, explane for explain, or declame for declaim. Of these it may be said, that as they have done no good they have done little harm; both because they have innovated little, and because ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... his pencil again. In the glow of the little electric lantern I saw his lean young face tense with the fierce effort of his thought. His pencil raced across the little pad, setting down symbols that I could ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... whole hall full of people held their breath in a tense uncertainty, because it was hard to believe in the broadcloth and fine linen in which he was clothed, but the brilliant hair, the ruffling crests, and the mocking, eery smile made them all certain by the second breath, which they gave forth in one long masculine hurrah mingled with ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... in tense readiness to dodge back out of danger, Carmena gazed over at her late pursuers with serene fearlessness. Her rich contralto voice, no longer harsh from thirst, rang mockingly ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... orange yellow, 2 to 3 inches broad, fleshy, soft, depressed, often eccentric, with the stem between centre and margin, and wavy, somewhat tomentose and involute at the margin. Stem 2 inches long, stuffed, and then hollow, somewhat incurved and unequal, yellowish. Gills decurrent, tense, and straight, repeatedly dividing by pairs from below upward (dichotomous) and crowded, often crisped at base, orange color. This species grows in woods, and is often found there during the months of autumn. ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin
... coin on to number nine. Ann followed the circlings of the ball with a curious tense anxiety. She wished desperately that the ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... exactness. Stress upon basal movements is not only compensating but is of higher therapeutic value against the disorders of the accessory system; it constitutes the best core or prophylactic for fidgets and tense states, and directly develops poise, control, and psycho-physical equilibrium. Even when contractions reach choreic intensity the best treatment is to throw activities down the scale that measures the difference between primary and secondary ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... and his face went white. He compressed his lips with an effort and choked back the words. Leverage, leaning forward in tense eagerness—knowing the verbal trap that Carroll had been ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... thunder of his hoofs when he made his first mad charge. She saw again, with marvellous fidelity, the whole colour-scheme just before the death of the big, brave beast: the huge arena in its unrivalled setting of mountain, sea and sky; the eager multitude, tense with expectancy; the silver-mounted bridles and trappings of the horses; the many-hued capes of the capadors; the gaily-dressed banderilleros, poising their beribboned barbs; the red flag and long, slender, flashing sword of the cool and ever watchful matador; ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... was nothing compared with the tempest that the principal had aroused in Eleanor. The latter flushed, then turned perfectly white with rage. Still standing, she reached down, picked up a book from her desk and took from it a paper. "This," she said, in a low tense voice, "is the paper you wish to see. I do not choose to let you see it, therefore ...
— Grace Harlowe's Junior Year at High School - Or, Fast Friends in the Sororities • Jessie Graham Flower
... thinner and paler than yesterday. There is a feverish eagerness in his eyes, a tremulousness in his voice. The doctor is to be up presently, and Grandon is persuaded to wait. After the first rejoicing is over, Grandon will not allow him to talk business, but taking up Goethe reads to him. The tense, worn face softens. Now and then he drops into a little doze. He puts his hand out to Grandon with a grateful smile, and so the two sit until nearly ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... thatch, tingled and burned and throbbed. Every faculty, too, seemed to stand straight up like a sentinel at its post, staring into dust clouds through which rode an approaching enemy. Eyes watched, ears listened, brain was hideously alert. The whole body kept itself tense, stiff, wary. For Valentine had a secret conviction at this moment that he was about to be attacked. By what? He was hardly master of himself enough to wonder. His thoughts no longer ran free. They crept like paralyzed things about his mind, and that despite the unnatural ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fall) would now correctly describe what, at so small a distance from the days of Luther and Calvin, may be supposed to have been the feeling among the Polish Unitarians; whereas Dr. Pusey's jacet (lies low, in the present tense) does as certainly partake somewhat of the grandiloquent. That no "boast," however, was intended, becomes probable, when we consider that the distich was designed to convey a feeling of reverence towards Socinus rather than ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... was neat and cool, and all the cook had to do was to furnish dishes and hot water for tea. There was very little jesting, and what there was of it fell to the lot of Coldfield and the Frenchman. The spirit in them all was tense. Given his way, the admiral would have gone out that very ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... They separated and approached her from either side, crouching low and snarling. Li Wan had struggled with the wolf-dog for mastery from the time she toddled among the skin-bales of the teepee, and she knew a crisis was at hand. Bash had halted, his muscles stiff and tense for the spring; Olo was yet creeping into ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... and the changing tones mingled with the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... the daughter of a landowner and general, a young and pretty girl, dreaming day and night of being married, was sitting in her room, gazing with exhausted, half-closed eyes into the looking-glass. She was pale, tense, and ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the tense mob about the party. These courteous and gentle Japanese had suddenly been transformed into a fierce, ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... right of my two friends, a little more awake, perhaps, than they, and so I was the first to perceive a little shaking of the soil, and knew that some one was coming down upon our hiding. We lay tense, our breathing caught at the chest, imposing on ourselves a stillness that swelled the noises of nature round about us—the wind, the river, the distant call of the crows—to a most clamorous ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... replied. "I deny nothing of what I have said, and your attitude has made me believe less in your religion than ever. Why"—and his voice became tense and bitter—"I'm willing to allow my religion to be tested by this election. I have not uttered one wrong word about you. I have done nothing to defame your character, in spite of what has passed. And yet you have sneered at my 'ignorant atheism and blatant unbelief.' Is that religion? Is that ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... a listening, tense, resentful inhabitant of the castle. He held up the key of the room in which ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... inside of the door with her eyes wide, glancing back and forth. She took one slow step forward, then another. Then she quickened. She moved through the room looking, then putting out a slow, hesitant hand to touch very gently. Tense, as if she were waiting for the warning not to touch, Martha finally caressed the hair of a ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... Latina, or would loiter for hours and hours along the Appian Way. It took him weeks to summon energy to visit S. Pietro in Vincoli, although he knew that Michelangelo's "Moses" was there, and though he was weary with longing to see it. All the tense chords of Ibsen's nature were loosened. His soul was recovering, through a long and blissful convalescence, from the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... broad upper intercostal spaces, an interesting feature, due to the tense and rigid nature of the muscles closing the intervals, and their large admixture of fibrous tissue, was sometimes noticed. The bullet, especially if passing obliquely, was apt to cut a slit in the muscles far exceeding in size the opening ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... another point also. Although some manufacturers in preparing synopses of their stories for the trade journals write them in the past tense, it is always advisable to tell your story in the present tense. In the scenario, you must follow this custom, and in the synopsis you should ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... a moment tense and motionless. Then he turned around. The woman who stood upon the threshold of the house, framed with a little cascade of drooping roses, sought for his eyes almost hungrily. He realised how she must be feeling. A dormant vein of cynicism parted his lips as he held her fingers for ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... afterward, went over and talked with Aunt Ruth before passing out and going round to his side of the divided house. But so long as he remained in sight, Cleek's narrowed eyes followed him and the tense creases seamed Cleek's indrawn, silent lips. But when he broke that silence it was to speak to the captain and to say some silly, pointless thing about that ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... reading, but listening intently to the conversation of the men seated behind him, and particularly to young Whitcomb's share in it. Upon hearing the latter's statement that he had with him the cash returns for the shipment of bullion, Darrell saw the muscles of his face suddenly grow tense and rigid, while his hands involuntarily tightened their hold upon the paper. He grew uncomfortable under Darrell's scrutiny, moved restlessly once or twice, then turning, looked directly into the piercing dark eyes fixed upon him. His own eyes, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... propeller had wreaked on one of them, to hold them back. However, he could judge the movements of those behind and below by the synchronized movements of those in front; for the sealmen, in this tense siege, seemed to move as one—just as they would move as one when a leader got the courage to charge across the gap ...
— Under Arctic Ice • H.G. Winter
... On the breeze there was borne to him the sound of voices—many voices. He closed the book with a bang. His small body became tense; his eyes glittered. He scented prey. He wrapped the book in its oilcloth, laid it upon the buggy seat, and taking Irontail by the bridle, started in the ...
— Kilo - Being the Love Story of Eliph' Hewlitt Book Agent • Ellis Parker Butler
... to Captain Strong," he paused and finished his sentence in a tense whisper, "I'll search the universe until I find Coxine. And when I do, I'll break ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... to admire her, and indeed I think that the witch was verily bent on casting a spell over me. No words can paint her as she stood in the dim-lit passage, the infinite sum of womanhood, peerless in every grace and gift; not now the tense, proud Margaret of the quick rebuke and the shattering sarcasm, but the mirthful, trustful, grateful companion ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... eyeballs tense, And swollen frontal veins: To all his powers of eloquence He gave ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... feeling over his neck and throat, groping for his face. "Rufus"—again came the tense ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... much longer," Banjo agreed, thinking of the hardship of being caught out in one of those sweeping blizzards, when the sudden cold grew so sharp that a man's banjo strings broke in the tense contraction. That had happened to him more than once, and it only seemed to sharpen the pleasure of being snowed in at a place like Alamito, where the kitchen was fat and the hand of the host free. He smiled as he turned to the kitchen to wash his ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... is no knowing what might have happened had not Fate intervened. But just as things had reached breaking-strain the door-bell rang. The prosaic sound brought us back instantly to earth, and a dramatic situation, tense with possibilities, became in ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... beside him, facing the room, with body motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... There was a tense silence for a minute. Through all the bewildering and overwhelming thoughts that were crashing through Broussard's brain, but one thing was clear and unshakable, the deathless loyalty that a ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... their eyes followed his every motion. His motions grew less and less rapid; he moved toward them, and then suddenly retreated, and through all these evolutions the three men's faces became more and more tense, and finally the muscles of their faces relaxed, their eyes stared with a blank expression, and the motions ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... scampering halfway across the pasture before he dared halt from the terror behind. And then, at last, another impulse which always sent the child stealing back into the woods again, shy, alert, tense as a watching fox, to find out what the fearful thing was that could make such a ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... reserve power, fellows!" he called in a low, tense voice. "Make every stroke count! Full muscle! Never mind your backs! One, two, ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... called in the front room, and the woman put on her cap and ran in; Jane stood where she left her. She hardly knew what moved her to-night; she saw her own body walking about, tense and foreign, as though some possession had it; she had felt a new, strange kind of strength all day, after she had her cry out. She looked up at the picture again, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to it, inch by inch, or whether it, seeing him about to make good his escape, had crept up on him, he could not say. He only knew that it was there, within arm's-length, waiting, tense, prepared, and somehow deadly in ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... six Joseph Rouletabille was again brought in. It is impossible for me to picture the tense excitement which appeared on every face, as he made his way to the bar. Darzac rose ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... of extorting the truth, Vaniman was conscious of a feeling of comradeship with the three rapscallions at that moment. They were merely seeking loot. He was seeking the re-establishment of his honor and his love. He waited in the tense silence, straining every nerve to hear. No sound came to him. He wondered whether Britt, cowed, was ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... bequests came first, and even the recollection that there was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could not quell the rising disgust and indignation. One likes to be done well by in every tense, past, present, and future. And here was Peter capable five years ago of leaving only two hundred apiece to his own brothers and sisters, and only a hundred apiece to his own nephews and nieces: the Garths were not mentioned, but Mrs. Vincy and Rosamond ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as 'poor Jemmie,' was at any time ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... conquest of Cortes, in his triumphant march from Vera Cruz to the capital. The plan of the battle of Cerro Gordo was so fully carried out in action that the official report is hardly more than the general orders translated from the future tense to the past. The story of Chapultepec has the same element of the marvelous in it. On one day the general commanded apparent impossibilities in the closest detail, and the next day reported that they had been accomplished. These successes were not cheaply attained. The Mexicans, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... glance was a tense eager expression, yet upon his face was written a mystery she could ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... wasn't frightened, but he had never met an opponent like this. A chill raced up the back of his legs and spread over his stomach and chest. His mouth was dry and his muscles quivered with tense anticipation. But his concentration never wavered. His hard blue eyes never left George's, searching with microscopic intentness for the faintest sign of the ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... closed, most of the houses were shuttered; all this was too remarkable not to have been arranged. Virginia and I looked at one another; but she watched me like a cat, keeping guard over every movement of mine. One hand pressed her bosom, the other was stretched downwards—a straight, tense line from ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Now I knew our current fate, and felt as if I heard again the gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling in April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that the park was deafening with the clangour of pallid, tense, and contending lunatics. The Serpentine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil shimmering was now fatuous and unbelievable. It was but half seen; its glittering was a distant grimacing and mockery at my troubled human intelligence. It was nothing ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... lifting an arm, took the blow on his elbow-joint and writhed, cursing; but while I laughed at the fellow's contortions, the plump man sprang (marvellous nimble) and dashed out the light and, as I stepped from before the window, I heard the lattice go with a crash of glass. Followed a long, tense moment wherein we all (as I judge) held our breath, for though the storm yet roared beyond the shattered casement, within was a comparative quiet. Thus, as I stood in the dark listening for some rustle, some stealthy creeping step to guide my next blow, I thrust away my pistol ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... faces of women and bright eager faces of little children who were holding out their hands trustfully to the future. There seemed to be a never-ending procession—faces that were apathetic from repeated disappointments, faces that scowled threateningly, brave faces tense with determination and sad faces on which was written the story of struggle hidden within many a lonely wind-buffeted shack on the great bosom of ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken. Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the window, alert and tense. He flew to the desk, found the envelope, steamed it open at the kettle, extracted the sealed envelope and Colonel Hare's note. He smiled as he read the letter and changed his plans completely. He would not play messenger; he would ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... further sound, I fancied I could hear the rustling of a large body forcing its way through the bush. "The man-eater," I thought to myself; "surely to-night my luck will change and I shall bag one of the brutes." Profound silence again succeeded; I sat on my eyrie like a statue, every nerve tense with excitement. Very soon, however, all doubt as to the presence of the lion was dispelled. A deep long-drawn sigh—sure sign of hunger—came up from the bushes, and the rustling commenced again as he cautiously ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping. Her whole being was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought. Their short exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing. She had guessed a faint resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a dawning ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... and severe, seems to them worthy to be continued yonder and without end. This day leading a better, itself good not leading alone,—this presentiment,—this solid increment of hard-won power,—of what other stuff should our eternity be woven? In wisdom first appears the present tense, an hour which is not mere transition, but something for itself. There are men who live—to live. He who finds our destiny given beforehand in the nature of things has the leisure of God: he has not only all the time that is, but spaces beyond, so that he will not be hurried by the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... implicated edged away from them on either side as far as possible, until they crouched, isolated, crestfallen, and self- condemned by their guilty countenances, a target for all eyes. At length Sekosini's story came to an end, and for a few tense moments a profound silence ensued. There was not an individual present who did not realise the vital importance to the entire nation of the issues that had been raised by the witch doctor's confession, and the manner ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... praeter perfect tense of the verb affo, affis, affui, affere," gabbled off Tom with such confidence, that though Ethel gave an indignant jump, Richard was almost startled into letting it pass, and disbelieving himself. He remonstrated in a somewhat hesitating voice. "Did you find that in the dictionary?" said ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... emotion in any garment when it was so beautiful in its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures whom I met in the ways and by ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,—I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct to ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... good," he said. "And that's the truth, Valerie." A dark flush stained his face and he turned it away, sitting there in silence, his tense clasp tightening on the arms of the chair. Then he said, still ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... moment and gasped as if for breath; his soup lay neglected before him, his elbows were on the table, and his two hands locked together in a grip so tense that the knuckles shone white in the light that came streaming in through the scuttles in the ship's side, his eyes were glassy and staring into vacancy with an intensity of gaze which plainly showed that the whole dreadful scene was again unfolding itself before his ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... too well known or too insignificant to justify comment. The notes are further reenforced by an Idiomatic Commentary, to be studied in connection with the text. By frequent reviews and by oral drill in translating the idioms from either language to the other, with changes of person, tense, etc., wherever possible, the Commentary should enable the student to attain to a real mastery of the idioms ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... Fair. She believed, with her whole heart and soul, that he loved her and her alone. And, indeed, she was at that time, at that minute, right and not deceived; for Burr Gordon was one of those who can encompass love in one tense only, and that the present; and they who love only in the present, hampered by no memories and no dreams, yield out love's sweetness fully. All Burr Gordon's soul was in his kisses and his fond eyes, and her own crept out to meet ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust- shells which you find sticking ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of my equestrian career in France, I never came off. I rode along in front of my section, balancing on this "Ship of the Desert" of mine, past all the same landmarks, cracked houses, windmills, estaminets, etc. I experienced innumerable tense moments when my horse—as frequently happened—took me for a bit of a circular tour in an adjacent field, so as to avoid some colossal motor lorry with one headlight of about a million candle-power, which would suddenly roar its way down our single narrow road. At ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... names over the gateway he entered the yard, and asked at the office if Solomon Chickerel was engaged on the premises. The clerk was going to be very attentive, but finding the visitor had come only to speak to a workman, his tense attitude slackened a little, and he merely signified the foot of a Flemish ladder on the other side of the yard, saying, 'You will find him, sir, up ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow and blinked out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the train there and I heard a woman's low tones, a southern voice, rich and full. Then quiet again. Every nerve was tense: time passed, perhaps ten minutes, possibly half an hour. Then, without the slightest warning, as the train rounded a curve, a heavy body was thrown into my berth. The incident, trivial as it seemed, was startling ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... strange gloom and a stranger fear; and so, because the greatest of all tragedies had come into their little world, Cummins' people were speechless in their grief and their waiting for the final word. And when the word came to them at last, and passed from lip to lip, and from one grim, tense face to another, the doors closed again, and the lights went out one by one, until there remained only the yellow eye of the factor's office and the faint glow from the little cabin in which John Cummins knelt ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... sigh of relief and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "Hark!" and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name—for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pupils, every sense tense with this effort to hear, the need to breathe, the impossibility of seeing, he advanced slowly, a pistol in one hand, touching the wall with the other to guide himself. He walked thus for fifteen minutes. A few drops of ice-cold water fell through ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the troubles of to-morrow. This is exceedingly foolish. There is always some pleasure at hand; seize it, and at no time will you be without pleasure. You cannot change the past, but your spirit at this moment will in some measure shape your future. Live life, therefore, in the present tense; do not miss the joys ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... tiptoes, encased himself in his mitt and turned, tense and alert. He had gone through his first ordeal triumphantly. No chances had come to him in the field, but at bat he had accidently succeeded in being hit, and though he had struck out the next time he had hit a foul and knew the jubilant ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... moved about David except a little smoke in the chimney of his throat. But the young lady did not wait for more silence to render things more tense. She stepped forward into the doorway beside his mother and peered curiously in, looking up at the smoke-blackened joists, at the black cross sticks on which the links of sausages were hung, at the little heap of gray ashes in the ground underneath with a ring of half-burnt chips ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his stay in Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange to say, while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past tense, Joanne, so much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate, the thing was worth trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We found the place a little way from Flers, a church and a few houses, called distinctively ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... theory which I adduced in my notes to Childe Rowland. Another point of interest in English folk-narrative is the repetition of verbs of motion, "So he went along and went along and went along." Still more curious is a frequent change of tense from the English present to the past. "So he gets up and went along." All this helps to give the colloquial and familiar air to the English fairy-tale not to mention the dialectal and archaic words and phrases ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... a splendour of silence, felt, Seen, and heard of the spirit within the sense. Soft through the frondage the shades of the sunbeams melt, Sharp through the foliage the shafts of them, keen and dense, Cleave, as discharged from the string of the God's bow, tense As a war-steed's girth, and bright as a warrior's belt. Ah, why should an hour that is heaven for an ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the brake and turned about for the next order, he cast his glance out upon the bay, and there, not a hundred and fifty yards away, her spotless sails tense, her cordage humming, her immaculate flanks slipping easily through the waves, the water hissing and churning under her forefoot, clean, gleaming, dainty, and aristocratic, the Ridgeways' yacht "Petrel" passed like a thing of life. Wilbur saw Nat Ridgeway himself at ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... they—at least than Mr. Deacon. He made little conjugal jokes in the presence of Lulu who, now completely unnerved by the habit, suspected them where they did not exist, feared lurking entendre in the most innocent comments, and became more tense ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... changing tones mingled with the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting the ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... this strange contempt for what his eyes could see, this distaste for words, this unbelief in the importance of things and men? He tried to regain possession of himself, his old self which had things to do, words to speak as well as to hear. But it was too difficult. He was seduced away by the tense feeling of existence far superior to the mere consciousness of life, and which in its immensity of contradictions, delight, dread, exultation and despair could not be faced and yet was not to be evaded. There was no peace in it. But who wanted peace? Surrender was better, the dreadful ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... had given over all hopes of yours. By-the-by, my 'grata superveniet' should be in the present tense; for I perceive it looks now as if it applied to this present scrawl reaching you, whereas it is to the receipt of thy Kilkenny epistle that I have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... mulatto had the best of it; his lithe dark limbs coiled about his adversary with paralyzing force: but soon the greater weight of the English youth began to tell; his young, well-knit figure straightened and grew tense. ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... If the persons spoken of were eternally elected, then they were also eternally called, and eternally justified, and eternally glorified. They would thus be justified before they sinned, and glorified before they had a being. The verbs are all in the aorist tense, and what is true of one verb is true of all the others. An interpretation burdened with such consequences cannot ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... when first that voice I heard, Despite my close and tense endeavour, When many an important word Was lost and gone forever; Though, unlike others at the play, I never whispered: ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... reel deadened now, and the stride of Miltiades was perceptibly lessened and then became but a vigorous up-and-down hop, while the tense line sang in the gentle ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... night and twice a day on Sunday. It was worse even than that. One night—we were sitting out on the veranda—her scarf slipped, and I saw a scar on her arm, near her shoulder." Hardy stopped abruptly and began to roll a little pellet of bread between his thumb and his forefinger; then his tense expression faded and he sat back in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a feeble dash of spirit, Jenny had attempted tactical flight. The sense of it made her feel as she had done, as a little girl, in playing touch; when, with a swerve, she had striven to elude the pursuer. So tense were her nerves on such occasions that she turned what is called "goosey" with the ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and dressed, and already some of the terrible frozen horror was gone from her face. She was still tense and devil-ridden, but ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... gone by, the atmosphere is still tense and surcharged with feeling, and the situation remains unaltered. However, the newspapers have changed their headings from "Outrage" to "Affair," although they are still devoting columns and columns to the matter. Protest meetings are still being held, and the run on the French ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... bottle, and the sprig of pine waved proudly from his bonnet, too. At every branch road they were joined by others, and when they neared the castle gates there was already quite a large group of people from the village as well. Every one was in a state of tense excitement, for the fate of all hung in the balance. Since the tenure of their homes was at the mercy of the new Laird, his ideas and disposition were of vital importance in their lives, and they were keen to see him and find out for themselves what manner of person he might ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants, but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken virtue and ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the opposite end, was brought to a shock of tense balanced alertness. How much did he know? He gave no sign of emotion, but reached for a cigarette to cover any change in his breathing, fumbling perhaps ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... to the house. Here, as after their ablutions they sat down to the evening meal, the archbishop remembered poor Marmaduke, and despatched to him one of his thirty household chaplains. Marmaduke was found fast asleep over the second tense ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... around her so that she could not get away by herself. Marie towered over her triumphantly. At last had come the chance to use her famous method of guarding. The crowd in the gallery leaned forward, tense and silent. The Mechanicals' forwards ran back under their basket to be in position to throw the ball in when Marie should send it down to them. The Washington guard threw the ball toward the massed group ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... crowd, I might waste my days unnoticed until such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious—dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known no other prayer to teach me than the childish ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... another link with the Cromwellian Wars. I remember, some forty years ago, my uncle, Sir Charles Cave, of whom I am glad to say I can speak in the present tense, told me that he was shooting on one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath. The tenant of the land was a very old farmer, and he informed my uncle that his grandmother, who lived to a great age, but whom he had just known ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... there was an expression of well-nigh ludicrous doubt and amazement. He glanced from one to the other. The giant shifted his own tense look from me to the Irishman. A gleam of approval lighted in his eyes. He loosed me, and gripped O'Keefe's arm. "Staerk!" he said. "Ja—strong, and with a strong heart. A man—ja! He ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... an order in Aguinaldo's handwriting dated Malolos, September 13 (?), 1898, [188] shows how tense was the situation while the question of withdrawal of the Insurgent forces from the city of Manila was under consideration. It contains instructions for General Pio del Pilar, General P. Garcia and General Noriel or Colonel Cailles. Their purpose is hardly ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... talk like that," thought Green, as he went off, followed by his two men. "Everybody speaks of poor Tom in the past tense, from the colonel to Gubbins. I won't believe that he is dead till I see it; as for the ambulance, they have had plenty of work, and might easily miss him, if he is senseless, and ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... the child's tense little face with its long, Eastern eyes and the mouth that showed so vividly scarlet against its ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... and modistes all over the land for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the "boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite time, but indicates a process at no time begun and at no time complete, their doctrine could not be expressed by our past-perfect tense begotten. When they compared the derivation of the Son of God from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... those mental images that are the replica of former experiences. It is the faculty of the mind by which we recognize remembered experiences as a part of our own past. If it were not for this sense of familiarity and of ownership and of the past tense of recalled mental images, there would be no way for us to distinguish the sense-perceptions of the past ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... half-drowsy ears, was amused by the colloquy that ensued, in the course of which Andy completely floored the Canadian by a glowing description of Dunore, delivered in the present tense, but referring, alas! to a period of sixteen or twenty years previously. But the smart black-eyed backwoodsman wound up with the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... 1836. The tense used in the original is future. What is meant, however, is that the great deity does these acts at the beginning of every Kalpa when he recreates the Earth. All cycles or Kalpas are similar in respect of the incidents that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... ordeal cast no shadow over Corporal. He was declaring his passionate devotion, by wild tense springs at Phelan's face, seeking in vain to overcome the cruel limitation of a physiognomy that made kissing ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... breast, continued to regard the melancholy figure opposite with a moody eye. It seemed a long minute before he broke the tense silence by a sigh of discomfort. "I do not discuss these things with anybody," he said then, coldly. "If I had known who you were, I don't ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... great events in South Africa has somewhat dimmed the recollection of our smaller troubles in previous years; but perhaps there are some who can recall the feeling of tense suspense that enthralled the nation during ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... knight, standing for ever in his shadowy mortuary niche in the gloom of some Gothic chapel. Drops of cold sweat trickled over the broad, sallow forehead. An incredible fearlessness looked out from every tense feature. His eyes of fire were fixed and tearless; he seemed to be watching some struggle in the darkness beyond him. Stormy thoughts passed swiftly across a face whose firm decision spoke of a character of no common order. His whole person, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... with a sharp click, into the catch. The noise startles me afresh; jarring, horribly, on my tense nerves. After that, I stand, for a long while, amid an ever-growing quietness. All at once, my knees begin to tremble, and I have ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... graces of the First Violin. Alma's countenance shone—possibly with the joy of the artist, perhaps only with gratified vanity. As she grew warm, the rosy blood mantled in her cheeks and flushed her neck. Every muscle and nerve tense as the strings from which she struck music, she presently swayed forward on the points of her feet, and seemed to gain in stature, to become a more commanding type. Her features suggested neither force of intellect or originality of character: but they had beauty, and something more. She stood a ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... from the preterperfect tense of bend. The space lying between two promontories or headlands, being wider and smaller than a gulf, but larger than a bay. It is also used generally for any coast-bend or indentation, and is mostly held as a synonym ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of the drums and cries. The wailing of the women behind the temple died. The tense air pulsed with electricity. A cock crowed feebly in the village. Then at a rippling splash of the drums and the sudden screaming of the wizards, they began to push the idol. The base had already been loosened in the earth ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... fours, began to quarter over the ground like a bloodhound seeking a trail. Every sense in him seemed to quicken to the hunt. His alert eyes narrowed in concentration. His fingertips, as he crept forward, touched the sand soft as velvet. His body was tense as a coiled spring. No cougar stalking its prey could have been more ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... material results of trade. That he is not a business man—and a successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... if you don't feel"—the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. But he hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... saws themselves are subsequently tightened by forcing home the keys until a certain amount of tension has been attained, this is ascertained only by the peculiar sound which emanates from the blade on being drawn considerably tight and tense. Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of the 27th of February—new style—was tense with an ominous expectancy. In the Allied chancelleries anxious groups were gathered. They realized that the fate of the Allies hung in the balance. In Petrograd alone three hundred thousand workers went out on strike that day, and ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... must indulge me in a long parenthesis. I beg him to bear me witness that I never made one before. This parenthesis is on the tense that I am obliged to use in sending to the press these minutes. The reader observes that the last transactions mentioned happen in April and May, 1871. Those to be narrated are the sequence of those already told. Speaking of them in 1870 with the coarse tenses of the English language is ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... eagerly for the choicest morsels,—and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the chopper in the woods,—the prostrate tree, the white new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe. The woods are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instrument. Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds in the still, white world, the day after the storm, to restore the lost track and demolish the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... hair brush did its work. Usually in such case Bobby howled before the first blow fell, but to-night he set his lips and uttered no sounds. Slap! slap! slap! slap! with deliberate spaces between. Bobby was released. He climbed down, his soul tense, with agony, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... showing 'em the way through the Narrers to ketch the Shark!" he growled; and he kept on his way till the imperative mood present tense was tried, and then he made for the side of the cutter, to receive what was to him a regular knock-down blow, or, as he put it, a wind taking him on ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... silence, sitting tense and mute, scarcely even breathing, while the pale blue eyes opposite remained steadily and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the bow of the canoe pulled in against the bank. Before he could recover sufficiently from his surprise to speak she had stepped aboard and he could hear her adjusting a cushion beneath her knees. Then came her tense whispered warning: ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... moment at one of the deck windows, gazing at the stars; and for no reason at all I realized I was tense. Johnson was a great one for his regular sleep—it was wholly unlike him to be roaming about the ship at such an hour. Had he been watching me? I told myself it was nonsense. I was suspicious ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... really in need of that myself. When it seemed as if one more step would kill us, we reached the rim, and fell panting with labored chests and dripping skins. We could not speak. Jones had worn a pair of ordinary shoes without thick soles and nails, and it seemed well to speak of them in the past tense. They were split into ribbons and hung on by the laces. His feet were cut ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in—a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... with the din. His plans were vague and unformed. He had one picture of some commanding position from which he could address the multitudes, another of meeting Ostrog face to face. He was full of rage, of tense muscular excitement, his hands gripped, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... night had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver interspaces, and all that tense silence of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... senses in forgetfulness of the world and its cares? On a sudden he starts from his couch with an appearance of frenzy!—his nostrils dilated, his eyes gleaming with immoderate excitation—an incipient curse quivering on his lips, and every vein swelling—every muscle tense with fearful and passionate energy of purpose. Is he possessed with a devil, or does he meditate suicide, that his manner is so wild and hurried? With impetuous velocity he rushes to the window, and beneath his vehement but futile strokes, aimed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... they made but a murmur compared to the whirlwind of sound that had arisen from the pit at the former struggles I had witnessed. There seemed but few blocks of the stock on the market. Yet the air was electric with the tense strain of thousands of minds eager to catch the faintest indication of the final result, and I found it more exciting than the wildest days of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... "Don't tense up, I won't," I told her. At the same time I made myself the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and bad, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened—sort ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... sat at the end of the table and ate with the tired, quiet soldiers. Now, the landlady was interested in him. Her brow was knit rather tense, there was a look of panic in her large, healthy face, but her small brown eyes were fixed most dangerously. She was a big woman, but her eyes were small and tense. She drew near the stranger. She wore a rather loud-patterned flannelette blouse, ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... unless she were strangely mistaken that form out there was Danglar's. She watched him as he headed toward a small building that loomed up like a black, irregular shadow across the courtyard, and which was Shluker's shop—watched him in a tense, fascinated way. She was in time, then—only—only somehow now her limbs seemed to have become weak and powerless. It seemed suddenly as though she craved with all her soul the protecting shadows of the tenement, and that every impulse bade her cling there, flattened ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... a strange, tense voice, "you are mad. You do not know what you ask. Virginia is not for such as you. Tell me that she does not know of your feelings toward her. Tell me that she does not reciprocate your love. Tell me the truth, man." Professor Maxon seized von Horn roughly by both shoulders, his glittering ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had been given a sudden conviction that after all there was something behind this disturbance. I saw, during the whole of the rest of that day, Grogoff's strange face with the exalted, bewildered eyes, the excited mouth, the body tense and strained as though waiting for a blow. And now, always when I look back I see Boris Grogoff standing in the doorway of the "Cave de la Grave" like a ghost from ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... leap and become tense. He saw the man's color go, saw his cheeks whiten; observed that his eyes widened and gleamed with mingled astonishment ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was a steam-ship of 2200 tons burthen, her length 336 feet, and her extreme breadth 60. She was of 1000 horse-power, with 81- inch cylinders, and a stroke of 12 feet. I speak of her in the past tense, because she has since been totally cast away in a storm on Lake Erie. This lake bears a very bad character, and persons are warned not to venture upon it at so stormy a season of the year as September, but, had the weather ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... that the perfect tense denotes an act begun in the past and completed in the present. Does its use sufficiently tell when a thing is or ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... have an instrument I have never seen in an identical form on the mainland. It is made like a bow, with a tense string of fibre. One end of the bow is placed against the mouth, and the string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick, while with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife- blade. This excruciating instrument, I warn any one ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Satan? Yehudas, what is that but Jews? And then homox, how very near to the Latin homo! I think, too, that I have even got a notion of some of the grammatical forms of the language. That termination of en, as in deluden, salubren, seems to me the sign of the present tense of the plural form of the verb. That other termination of tar, as in ebuntar, carantar, I suppose to be the sign of the infinitive. Depend upon it that this language is one of absolute regularity, undeformed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... said, breaking a tense silence and with a sudden stress in his voice. "Don't leave me. Stop with me yet—for a little while.... You ... ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... liquid ease, he was on his feet, body tense, alert. Her form was vaguely familiar as she ran toward him. She dodged from his sight, then re-appeared as the winding path cut ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... figure, but her cranny did not serve her to show her the two where they were now; she knelt on her knees in ignorant suspense. Slowly and with a patient force Rudolf began to work his enemy's arms towards one another. Rupert had read his design in his eyes and resisted with tense muscles. It seemed as though his arms must crack; but at last they moved. Inch by inch they were driven closer; now the elbows almost touched; now the wrists joined in reluctant contact. The sweat broke out ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... voice was cooler, steadier, now. The first great strain had subsided. He was cool, tense, now—though not a whit less determined ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... pushed the attack, but never lost control of myself nor became reckless. It was an inspiriting revelation to me to find that I could indeed use my head intelligently, and command my motions so well, at a time of such excitement. We grew hot, perspired, breathed fast and loud, kept our muscles tense, and held each other with glittering eyes as we moved about on firm but springy feet. We must have fought very swiftly, for the ring of the steel sounded afterward in my ears as if it had been almost continuous. How long we kept it up, I do not exactly know. We came to panting more deeply, and ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... when at last we rose to our feet, Lord K., finding his visitor wholly unconvinced, drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to tower over the Attache, who was himself a tall man, and—well, it is hard to set down in words the happenings of a tense situation. The scene was one that I never shall forget, as, by his demeanour rather than by any words of his, Lord K. virtually issued a command that no Serb soldier was to cross the Bulgar border unless the Bulgars embarked on hostilities. The Attache stood still a moment; ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... the Ironworker with the irresistible attraction of antipathy. The verro stood silent and as if abstracted among his admirers, who formed a circle around him. He seemed not to see the others, fixing his eyes on Margalida with a tense expression, as if he would conquer her with this stare which inspired fear in men. When the Little Chaplain, with the enthusiasm of youth, approached the verro, he deigned to smile, seeing in the boy ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was, and in one or other identity she could be my friend or my powerful enemy, could aid my country powerfully if she had the whim; or damage it irreparably if she had the desire. But—yes—as I studied her that keen, tense, vital ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... minutes—then liberty and life. The better to guard his movements, his gaze fell. Out and down went his right hand, then his left, as his lithe body slid forward. Again he glanced up, paused—and on the instant every muscle of his tense body went suddenly lax. Instead of the closed eyes and sleeping face he had expected, two steady eyes were giving him back look for look. There had not been a motion; the face was yet that of a sleeper; the chest still rose and fell steadily; ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... with an inescapable atmosphere of foreboding; note the incident of the fugitive doves in the scene at Melisande's tower window; or the episodic passage near the end of the third act, during the tense and painful scene of Golaud's espionage: "Do you see those poor people down there trying to kindle a little fire in the forest?—It has rained. And over there, do you see the old gardener trying to lift ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... informed that the good people lived west of the tracks. East of the tracks it was different. The past tense is used with a full appreciation of the necessity for grammatical construction, for times have changed in San Pasqual, since it is no longer encumbered with the incubus that made this story possible—Harley P. Hennage, the town gambler and ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... resembles that of death. (7/9.) Now the Odynerus, the Anthidium, the Eucera, the Ammophila, and all the hymenoptera which Fabre has observed sleeping at the fall of night, "suspended in space solely by the strength of their mandibles, their bodies tense, their limbs retracted, without exhaustion or collapse"; and the larva of the Empusa, "which for some ten months hangs to a twig by its limbs, head downwards": do not these present a surprising analogy with those hypnotized persons ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the fruits, the very essence of the delicious languor of the place that made our steps to falter. A bird shot a bright flame of color through the checkered light ahead of us. Suddenly a sound brought us to a halt, and we stood in a tense and wondering silence. The words of a song, sung carelessly in a clear, girlish voice, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the transition from the conditional to the future tense, and also the circumstance that his father had been lost in a book according to his now confirmed custom of evening ease. This proved him not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, of speech, ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... motion and fluidity of the music delighted him with a strange exasperation. There was something tense, exasperated to the point of intolerable anger, in his good-humored breast, as he played the finely-spun peace-music. The more exquisite the music, the more perfectly he produced it, in sheer bliss; ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... predisposition to think of everything as the result of an action performed by an agent. And they have no definite parts of speech; any word can be used as any part of speech, depending on context. Tense is applied to words used as nouns, not words used as verbs; there are four tenses—spatial-temporal present, things here-and-now; spatial present and temporal remote, things which were here at some other time; spatial remote and temporal present, things existing now somewhere else, and ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... his beard he plucked with merriment that jangled horribly on the girl's tense nerves. Suddenly he grew serious. For the first time he seemed to take clear notice of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... upon its fine ankles and narrow feet, never stands without implying and expressing life. It is the leg that first suggested the phantasy of flight. We imagine wings to the figure that is erect upon the vital and tense legs of man; and the herald Mercury, because of his station, looks new-lighted. All this is true of the best leg, and the best leg is the man's. That of the young child, in which the Italian schools of painting delighted, has neither movement nor supporting strength. In the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... with commanding rhyme— Soul calm, like thee, yet fain, like thee, to grow By double increment, above, below; Soul homely, as thou art, yet rich in grace like thee, Teaching the yeomen selfless chivalry That moves in gentle curves of courtesy; Soul filled like thy long veins with sweetness tense. By every godlike sense Transmuted from the four ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... subjacent tissues, and lymph vessels are thereby torn across. The cyst is usually situated between the skin and fascia, and contains clear or blood-stained serum. At first it is lax and fluctuates readily, later it becomes larger and more tense. The treatment consists in drawing off the contents through a hollow needle and applying firm pressure. Apart from injury, lymph cysts are met with as the result of the distension of lymph spaces and vessels (lymphangiectasis); ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... a few words now about the place itself. Greshamsbury Park was a fine old English gentleman's seat—was and is; but we can assert it more easily in past tense, as we are speaking of it with reference to a past time. We have spoken of Greshamsbury Park; there was a park so called, but the mansion itself was generally known as Greshamsbury House, and did not stand in the park. We may perhaps best describe it by saying that the village ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... the up-spouting column of flames the airship winged her way. Tense and alert, Tom sat at the wheel guiding his craft with her load of fire-defying chemicals. Behind him were Ned, Mr. Damon and Mr. Baxter, ready to drop the ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... smoke. The cry of the wolves had floated—but this new cry seemed to hurl itself through the night—a terrifying crescendo of noise that sounded at once a challenge and wail. For a full minute after the sound ceased the boy sat tense and motionless, staring wide-eyed beyond the fire, while behind him, in the farthest corner of the tent the malamutes huddled and whined. Then he shook himself and laughed. "Some howl!" he muttered, "I bet they heard that in Ten Bow. That's the Big ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... every one bolted, for here sat two of the colony among the broken rocks. These two had not been frightened off. That both of them were greatly alarmed, any one could see from their open beaks, their rolling eyes, their tense bodies on tiptoe for flight. Yet here they sat, their wings out like props, or more like gripping hands, as if they were trying to hold themselves down to the rocks against ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... carried baskets of fruit or washing upon the crown of her pate since her youth; her glorious bosom was like a bed of lotus buds in the southern wind; she moved like a deer, or a snake, or a bacchanalian dancer, as you will; but in any case in a way which in the present tense caused the Principal to mourn in secret, and in the future brought the condemnation of women and the eyes of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... to dances and suppers at the houses of college acquaintances. Sometimes she one-stepped demurely; sometimes, in dread of life's slipping past, she turned into a bacchanal, her tender eyes excited, her throat tense, as she slid down ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... too much just now of their rights. There is a decadent form of chivalry or at least a sexuality that perpetuates conventions and interests that on the whole seem to interfere with progress. Jealousy and in general the tense emotional relations between the sexes obscure larger issues. Thus misunderstanding or antagonism, or at least disharmony, prevails in relations in which there should be perfect harmony of ideals and purposes, and productive activities of the highest nature. The education of women, whether for the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... pain, sorrow in silence endured; Fighting, at last I have fallen, and sought the breast of the Mother,— Quite cast down I have crept close to the broad sweet earth. Lo, out of failure triumph! Renewed the wavering courage, Tense the unstrung nerves, steadfast the faltering knees Weary no more, nor faint, nor grieved at heart, nor despairing, Hushed in the earth's green lap, lulled ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... The moment was tense with danger. Heedless of the black looks of Dolph, Tom dug his heels into his pony's flanks, ...
— The Young Engineers in Nevada • H. Irving Hancock
... divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her eyes wet. Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final? If it ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... visualizer—the stereographic device, in parallel with Solon's own brain recorder, which projected a three-dimensional picture into the "viewing-area" or dark space of the cabinet. Crane and Dunark, tense and silent, looked on in strained suspense as, minute after minute, the silent battle of wills raged. Upon one side was a horrible and gigantic brain, of undreamed of power; upon the other side a strong man, fighting for all that life holds dear, wielding against that monstrous ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... fear emotions. Fear is unpleasant. In addition to its unpleasantness there is a multitude of sensations that come from the body. The hair stands on end, the heart throbs, the circulation is hastened, breathing is interrupted, the muscles are tense. This peculiar mass of sensations, blended with the unpleasantness, gives the characteristic emotion of fear. But we need not go into an analysis of the various emotions of love, hate, envy, grief, jealousy, etc. The reader can ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... at each other, heads forward, bodies tense; as they glared the fury of betrayal grew ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... speaking. No one could tell when he had begun. He stood slightly crouched, with his hands on the edge of the table. His face was absolutely blank and expressionless, while his eyes were fixed on the officer with a tense, glassy stare. His voice was cold and monotonous, without rise or fall, halt or intonation, and seemed to be more the wail of the spirit rising from somewhere deep within him than the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... amazing skill, the cavalry swung forward en route for the open country, staff officers galloped along the lanes, and in a few short moments the whole atmosphere had changed from pastoral peace to the tense excitement of military activity. Every few moments an enemy plane came over to have a look at Khan Yunus, though it is doubtful whether they saw very much, for an army could easily have hidden itself between ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... him moving from room to room, and presently, as I waited in hushed, tense watchfulness, he came in, depositing the grip upon the table. His ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... sidewise from the ground and neighed piteously. Madwell stepped forward, drew his revolver and shot the poor beast between the eyes, narrowly observing its death-struggle, which, contrary to his expectation, was violent and long; but at last it lay still. The tense muscles of its lips, which had uncovered the teeth in a horrible grin, relaxed; the sharp, clean-cut profile took on a look of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... beside the man, his voice a tense whisper in the musty cell. "I mean that right now you are practically dead. You may not know it, but you are. You walk into a newly opened planet with your smart little bag of tricks, walk in here with a shaky passport and no permit, with no knowledge ...
— Letter of the Law • Alan Edward Nourse
... the conviction that there is no such thing as time—surely there can be no time here within Pellucidar, where there are no means for measuring or recording time. Why, the Mahars themselves take no account of such a thing as time. I find here in all their literary works but a single tense, the present. There seems to be neither past nor future with them. Of course it is impossible for our outer-earthly minds to grasp such a condition, but our recent experiences seem ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... well, and more truly, be taken into account, and put in their proper tense," she urged, to Mr. Sherrett. "There is a bond between these two lives which neither you nor I have the making or the timing of. It will assert itself; it will modify everything. This is just what ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... crowded sidewalk a creation in white hurtled past us. One glance at the tense face in the flickering arc light was enough for Kennedy. He pulled my arm and we turned and followed at ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... stylus, afforded a time record in quarter seconds. Upon this tambour, placed within comfortable reach of the reactor's hand, the various rhythm types were beaten out. The impact of the finger-tip on the tense surface of the drum gave forth a faint and pleasing but at the same time clearly discernible and distinctly limited sound, which responded with audible variations of intensity to the differing stresses involved in the process of tapping, and which I have considered preferable to the short, sharp ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... he had pushed her arm from his shoulder, and stood in tense and trembling silence, looking up, as though listening for an answer ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to him every male that openeth the womb, both of man and beast," from the time of the death of the first-born of the Egyptians. The impropriety of ex post facto legislation, the reason assigned for this law, and the grammatical meaning of the language in the present tense, all combine to show that the law is prospective; and the number of the first-born, twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-five, afterward given in Numbers, shows plainly that this is the meaning, being about the proper increase of thirteen months. But the bishop ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... I was last up. I'd begun waggling as usual, body swaying, shoulders rigid, muscles tense, dreading to swing and wondering whether the result would be a schlaff or a top, when—well, I simply cannot describe the sensation. Something came over me; I don't know what. As if someone had waved a magic wand above my head. I stopped swaying, relaxed, felt the weight of the club head in ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... of the preterit plural is never different from the stem of the preterit singular; hence these verbs have only three distinctive tense-stems, or principal parts: viz., (1)the present indicative, (2)the preterit indicative, and (3)the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... that went on day after day for weeks, sometimes dull with legal formalities, sometimes tense with "human" interest. And, day after day, the three girls occupied their favored seats beside the judge, listening to the evidence of the great conspiracy against Society, watching the prisoners—a sorry lot of men generally—and staring haughtily down at the jammed ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... delicacies hitherto unheard of in that land! In the other box was an object almost as unfamiliar as an oyster can,—an oblong, smooth, and now partially frost-covered object with tinfoil about its upper end. A certain tense ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... enemy had divided and fled. For a few moments there was a strange, tense silence. Then ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... to retrospective judgments, using the past tense, what these judgments utter WAS true, even tho no past thinker had been led there. We live forwards, a Danish thinker has said, but we understand backwards. The present sheds a backward light on the world's previous ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Count Victor, questioning, but he got no answer. Doom came up to him and peered at him as if he had been a ghost, a tear upon his cheek, something tense and troubled in his countenance, that showed him for the moment incapable of ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... weeks passed, the situation became more tense. All the principals in the drama were at the capital—Adams as Secretary of State, Crawford as Secretary of the Treasury, Clay as Speaker of the House, Jackson as Senator—and the city was filled with followers who busied themselves ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... cheer-leader, leaped upon the platform, raised a megaphone to his mouth, and shouted, "A regular cheer for Sanford—a regular cheer for Sanford." Then he lifted his arms above his head, flinging the megaphone aside with the same motion, and waited tense and rigid until the students were on their feet. Suddenly he turned into a mad dervish, twisting, bending, gesticulating, leaping, running back and forth across the platform, shouting, and finally throwing his hands above his head and ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... He walked away. He was quite warm and tense now—almost nervous. It was quite clear to him that he had done or was contemplating perhaps a very treacherous thing. Under the current code of society he had no right to do it. It was against the rules, as they were understood by everybody. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... now correctly describe what, at so small a distance from the days of Luther and Calvin, may be supposed to have been the feeling among the Polish Unitarians; whereas Dr. Pusey's jacet (lies low, in the present tense) does as certainly partake somewhat of the grandiloquent. That no "boast," however, was intended, becomes probable, when we consider that the distich was designed to convey a feeling of reverence towards Socinus rather ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 59, December 14, 1850 • Various
... motioned the innkeeper to enter. Following closely behind, he saw the innkeeper start with surprise at the sight of the two inmates of the room. Mr. Cromering was seated at the table, but Superintendent Galloway was standing up with his back to the fireplace. There was a moment's tense silence before ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... nominations, in due course presented its slate as usual, but here the real battle began. Bradley suddenly found himself tense with interest. His ancestry must have been a race of orators and politicians, for the atmosphere of the convention roused him till it ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... constipation with persistent vomiting. The lump may be tense, hard and irreducible. Then there is faintness, collapse; severe abdominal pain, complete constipation, with no gas passing, then vomiting, at first of food, then of the bile-stained fluid and finally of fluid with a bowel odor. All these symptoms ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... a step nearer, watching his face; tense, breathless. Clearly he had turned her thoughts from the fence, and he slipped the knife in farther and continued to pry and twist the wire loose. "How do you know it was a ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... practice she craved it, and expected it, and was irritated if she did not get it. But, as she realized how unattractive this weakness was, she usually took perhaps more pains than does the average person to conceal it. That day her nerves were too tense for petty precautions. However, Mrs. Colman was too busy inspecting the details of Miss Hastings' toilet ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... her chair and brought the letter to Constance close to the light. She read it through, calmly, without haste or excitement. Roger's hands gripped the arms of his chair and his face turned ashen. His whole body was tense. ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... against its loss of Manchuria. The League sent a commission (the Lytton Commission), which condemned Japan's action, but nothing further happened, and China indignantly broke away from her association with the Western powers (1932-1933). In view of the tense European situation (the beginning of the Hitler era in Germany, and the Italian plans of expansion), the Western powers did not want to fight Japan on China's behalf, and without that nothing more could be done. They pursued, indeed, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... to bound over the billowy waters of the lake towards their destination, with all the speed which strong arms and nerves made tense with excitement could impart, let us anticipate their arrival, to note what befell the objects of their anxieties, whom we so abruptly left in their perils from the fire, to bring up the other incidents of the day having an equal bearing on the story, with ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... she paused upon the threshold, tense, thrilled, apparently speechless. Tom was reminded of a trim little wren poised upon the edge of its nest. This time it was more difficult to counterfeit an exclamation of joy, but the catch in "Bob's" voice, the moisture in her eyes, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... a little space of very tense silence, during which my eyes roved to the little silver traveling-clock on the mantel, and then I said in a voice ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... for a more ecstatic burst. You purposely prolong his suspense; he is all atilt, expecting the delightful surprise. You drawl out each word; you drone the ditty over and over again, till every tiny nerve is tense with expectation. "Boo!" at last, and over he goes, in the complete abandon of baby glee; his cherry lips are wide asunder, his head hangs powerless back, and the "Hicketty-hicks" burst tumultuously from his little, beating throat. And ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... only in the power of God. He has provided a complete salvation from the dominion and power of evil, which is a real victory—the only victory for the believer in this present life and conflict. It is a second form or tense of salvation, for it is possible to be saved from the condemnation and penalty of sin, and still for a time to be under its dominion and power. Salvation from the power of the world, the flesh, and the devil, ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... to put it that way because Scandinavian grammar is not a strong point with me, and my knowledge of the verbs is as yet limited to the present tense of the infinitive mood. Besides, this was no time to worry about grace ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... "nerve yourself. I'm afraid it's going to be worse than I feared. It seems that there were actually six of them—only one is not quite finished. The competition was very tense—and they all arrived in my absence. Old man, hold ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith), bastards (Antony; Le Fils Naturel), ex-convicts (John Gabriel Borkman), people with ideas in advance of their time (Ghosts), and a host of other characters that are usually considered dangerous to society. In order that the dramatic struggle might be tense, the dramatists have been forced to strengthen the cases of their characters so as to suggest that, perhaps, in the special situations cited, the outcasts were right and society was wrong. Of course it would be impossible to base a play upon the thesis that, in a ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... dropped her embroidery upon the bench and was looking upward, her head thrown back, the muscles of her arching neck tense and drawn. She seemed wrapt in ecstacy, as if visions of the past were filing by in front of her. Suddenly ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... passion as when Jeremiah speaks in his own person. The Prophet is very sure that his God is Love, and he hears that love utter itself in tones of yearning for the love of men, and even of agony for their sin and misery. There is, too, a singular prayer of his which is tense with the instinct, that God would surely be to Israel what Jeremiah had resolved and striven to be—not a far-off God who occasionally visited or passed through His people, but One in their midst sharing their pain; not ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... of Abel cried out for vengeance against his slayer, how much more does the blood of Christ cry out for pardon for all who plead it! "It cleanseth (present tense) from all sin." ...
— Sovereign Grace - Its Source, Its Nature and Its Effects • Dwight Moody
... hurry—no earthly hurry. He felt sure of it. In the silence and the blackness—in the tense, steamy atmosphere of expectancy—he felt perfectly at ease, although he knew, too, that there was superstition to be reckoned with—and that is something which a white man finds hard to weigh and cope with, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... of an old bed- sacking, stuffed out into most plethoric dimensions, tottering on a pair of small, meagre legs, and peering out with his wild, hairy face from under his burden like a big-bodied spider. That "man with the pack" always inspired me with awe and reverence. Huge, almost sublime, in its tense rotundity, the father of all packs, never laid aside and never opened, what might there not be within it? With what flesh-creeping curiosity I used to walk round about it at a safe distance, half expecting to see ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... low and laughing and warm with a sweet friendliness, but they crashed through the room like the breath of a swarm of furies. Andrew Sevier's face went white and drawn on the instant, and every muscle in his body stiffened to a tense rigidity. His dark eyes narrowed themselves to slits ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... tones mingled with the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... of little gasps, emanating, apparently, from nowhere, from no one, fall into the next pause. ANTHONY is the color of chalk. GLORIA'S lips are parted and her level gaze at the old man is tense and frightened. There is not one smile in the room. Not one? Or does CROSS PATCH'S drawn mouth tremble slightly open, to expose the even rows of his thin teeth? He ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... was in tense whispers, and the listening was now of the same tenseness. Two khaki-clad Sammies stood on the alert in the muddy ditch, dignified by the title, "trench," and tried to pierce the darkness that was like a pall of black ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... as frequently elsewhere, the syllable ya is introduced merely to complete the metre. Ordinarily it is the sign of the imperfect tense, and has other meanings (see the Vocabulary), but in many instances does not admit ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... pretended to be four or five hundred years more ancient than the matters it speaks of, refers to, them as facts; for in the case of pursuing them unto Dan, and of the kings that reigned over the children of Israel; not even the flimsy pretence of prophecy can be pleaded. The expressions are in the preter tense, and it would be downright idiotism to say that a man could ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... affair, collectively and in detail. He devoted his chief attention, however, to Big Waller. He "caught" that gigantic Yankee in every conceivable action and attitude. He photographed him, we might almost say, with his legs apart, the hatchet high above his head, and every muscle tense and rigid, preliminary to a sweeping blow. He "took" him with a monstrous pile of logs on his brawny shoulder; he portrayed him resting for a moment in the midst of his toil; he even attempted to delineate him tumbling over one of the logs, and hurling ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... all betrayed a friendly interest, though they were not at all persons that mattered, being of the semi-leisured class who each day went down, as they put it, "to see Number Six go through." There was thus a rather tense air of expectancy when the train pulled in. From one of the Pullman night coaches emerged the Honourable George, preceded by a blackamoor or raccoon bearing bags and bundles, and followed by another uniformed raccoon and a white guard, also bearing bags and ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the desk and inquired whether there were any messages or visitors for Mr. Kay McKay; and the quiet, penetrating glances of the clerks on duty immediately discovered his state of intoxication but nothing else, except his extreme politeness and the tense whiteness ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... stiff collar Lord Saint Sinnes looks down at her—with something of the deep intuition which makes him the finest steeplechaser in England. Perhaps he notes the quiver of the lip, the sinews drawn tense about her throat. Such silent signals of distress are his business. Certainly he notes the little shiver of abject fear which passes through the girl's slight form as they pass out of the room together. Their departure is noted ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... I remember best was the way in which the repetition of the Lord's Prayer rolled from the lips of the assembly like the sound of the surging of the sea. It was the emotional effect of a strongly emotional moment. One felt tense. It was hard to restrain tears. As far as crowd-sympathy has any spiritual value it was there. The Caucasian God was taken out of His pigeon-hole and ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... clergyman sighed and closed the volume of "Browne on The Thirty-nine Articles," and pushed it from him on the table. He could not tell what the words meant; he could not keep his mind tense enough to follow an argument of three sentences. It must be that he was very tired. He looked into the fire, which was burning badly, and about the bare, little, dusty study, and realized suddenly ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... are tense and damp with the dews of thought. In that head you see the great future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the whir of a bell, the murmur of voices. Jean sat tense. Then as her caller entered, she got somewhat ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... approach of two horsemen from the Gully Crossing. They did not stop at the garden gate, but made for the usual station entrance at the back. One of them, lingering behind the other, gazed earnestly at Lady Bridget's tense little figure and bent head, poised in a listening attitude and conveying to him the impression that something momentous had happened or was about to happen. And just then, appalling shrieks, from the rear of the home, justified ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... little book again and read. He read steadily for a quarter of an hour in a monotonous, singsong voice, and John Minute slowly sat himself erect and listened with tense face and narrow eyelids to the record. He did not interrupt ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... and was evidently ready to tell Frankie exactly what he meant. But Frankie broke in, his voice low and tense. "Milt—" ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... of duty. Dudley had used him as a guide, and the man had a dog-like devotion to 'the lieutenant' which counted with me. Also he didn't talk. I think he knew only four words. I flung orders at him and there would be first a shock of excitement, then a second of tense anxiety, then a radiant smile and the four words: 'C'est bien, Mon Capitaine.' I was ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... from my mind, for even more vividly than my earlier impressions of Con Darton, it marked the wizardry as well as the fearfulness of his power. A hundred times during that burial service the sound of a banged door and a rasped voice sounded in my ears and the sight of a tense, hurrying figure in a black dress and a bumpy red shawl moved before my eyes. The thin figure was lying there now and over it, his rusty black coat tails curving in the wind, like wings bent to trap the air, his gray eyes misty with emotion, hovered the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... With what hushed, tense expectation they would enter the chamber! Think of the mother's eyes watching Him. The very words that He spoke were like a caress. There was infinite tenderness in that 'Damsel!' from His lips, and so deep ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... representation of the common events befalling us in these times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia gathered it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was how it came about that this devoted daughter, after days of exasperation and nights of anxiety, reached a point of tense determination. She would go and see the man's son, and say ... that afternoon, as she stood before the swinging glass on her high bureau, tying her bonnet-strings, she tried to think what she would say. She hoped God would give her words—polite words; "for I must ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... again and waited. The silence was so tense that it seemed to bear the impact of her pulses; it throbbed and quivered with pain. Outside, the sound of the pebbles, crunched under Pilkington's footsteps, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... doubt that you and the original of this picture are closely united by ties of consanguinity, for your resemblance to her is very striking. You spoke in the past tense, however, so I suppose the lady is ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... So tense was Eustace's concentration that he did not see Billie Bennett, seated in the front row. Billie had watched him enter with a little thrill of embarrassment. She wished that she had been content with one of the seats at the back. But her friend Jane Hubbard, ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... neck, the horses raced. Miss Prue's bonnet slipped and hung rakishly above one ear. Her hair loosened and fell in straggling wisps of gray to her shoulders. Her eyeglasses dropped from her nose and swayed dizzily on their slender chain. Her gloves split across the back and showed the white, tense knuckles. Her breath came in gasps, and only a moaning "whoa—whoa" fell in jerky rhythm from her white lips. Ashamed, frightened, and dismayed, Miss Prue clung to the reins and kept her straining eyes on the ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... with shut eyes, I mean to weld our faces—through the dense Incalculable darkness make pretense That she has risen from her reveries To mate her dreams with mine in marriages Of mellow palms, smooth faces, and tense ease Of every longing nerve of indolence,— Lift from the grave her quiet lips, and stun My senses with her kisses—drawl the glee Of her glad mouth, full blithe and tenderly, Across mine own, forgetful if is done The old love's awful dawn-time ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... wild noise of the college yells greeting the teams, the taunting horns that shattered the music of the rival bands, the shrill treble of gamins who had climbed over impossible fences, the hoarse bellow of the brown paper megaphones,—all this tumult had hushed suddenly into a tense, aching silence in which fingers dug into board seats and College hearts stopped beating when the teams faced each other ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... Crawshay's muscles tingled with the apprehension of danger. There was a smouldering light in the other's eyes, such a light as might gleam in the tiger's eyes before his spring. Crawshay's hand slipped to his hip pocket. So for a moment they remained. Then Jocelyn Thew shrugged his shoulders, and the tense moment was past. ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in an involuntary attitude of defiance. His arm was raised, his fist clinched, as if for a blow; his face uplifted with stern reprisal; then his arm dropped, his tense muscles relaxed. "I could not marry her if I did not give it up," he said. "I should not be worthy of her; there is no ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of in the past tense, as we speak of the dead, was not pleasant to Sir Francis, walking behind Geoffrey ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... "buried aour little Anny Mari'," and others of that homespun stripe, were founded in reason, after all. And so it was natural enough that they should be shared by various ladies, who, having conjugated the verb to live as far as the preterpluperfect tense, were ready to change one of its vowels and begin with it in the present indicative. Unfortunately, there was very little chance of showing sympathy in its active form for a gentleman who kept himself so much out of the way as the master ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... already referring to the foolish Persian in the past tense; yet, in view of probable results, and in the stress of such violent circumstance, her anti-mortem sorrow might at ...
— A Night Out • Edward Peple
... looking out over the fields. Only by the light of the moon could Douglas see his face, and he noticed that it was very haggard. But he could not see the fire of anger which was kindling in his eyes. Only when the bent form straightened itself with a jerk, and a tense arm was thrust out, did he fully realise the greatness of ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... my features to a deeper solemnity and sadness than usual—no very easy task, I have been told; otherwise, I really had not the remotest conception of what his lordship meant. I knew very well the thing called a tense; I knew even then by name the Aoristus Primus, as a respectable tense in the Greek language. It (or shall we say he?) was known to the whole Christian world by this distinction of Primus; clearly, therefore, there must be some low, vulgar tense in the background, pretending ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Robert de Baudricourt awaiting my coming in the great hall, pacing restlessly to and fro. Bertrand was with him, and I saw by the tense expression upon his face that he was eager for my report. I gave him one quick glance upon entering, which I trow he read and understood; but to De Baudricourt I spoke with caution and with measured words, for he was a man whose scorn and ridicule were easily aroused, and I knew that ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... hoisted, and the beautifully-shaped cutter began to rush through the water at a rapid rate, leaving two long lines of foam in an ever-widening wake, while, like some gigantic sword-fish, she ploughed her way through the glittering sea. The sails bellied out tense and stiff, and the wind whistled as it seemed to sweep off the ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... which candidates after election are to purge themselves. Again, quae erant omnibus sortita is very difficult. Cicero nowhere else, I believe, uses the passive sortitus. But, passing that, what are the consilia meant? The tense and mood shew, I think, that the words are explanatory by the writer, not part of the decree. I venture, contrary to all editors, to take omnibus as dative, and to suppose that the consilia meant are those of the album iudicum who ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... that, even since the first of August, 1834, the evils of West India emancipation on the lips of the advocates of slavery, or, as the most of them nicely prefer to be termed, the opponents of abolition, have remained in the future tense. The bad reports of the newspapers, spiritless as they have been compared with the predictions, have been traceable, on the slightest inspection, not to emancipation, but to the illegal continuance of slavery, under the cover of its legal substitute. Not the slightest reference to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... out on his tiptoes, encased himself in his mitt and turned, tense and alert. He had gone through his first ordeal triumphantly. No chances had come to him in the field, but at bat he had accidently succeeded in being hit, and though he had struck out the next time he had hit a ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... conciliatory conference is held to be applicable to international and interracial conflict as it is to that between workers and employer, or between man and wife. But it is not content to stop there. It would defy all fears and bring into the tense process of arriving at this joint decision a kind of patience and a quiet confidence which believes, not that there is no other way, but that there is a 'third-alternative' which will annihilate ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... prize money. Marshall's decision was a strong assertion of the federal jurisdiction and power. The Governor of Pennsylvania, under sanction of the state legislature, called out the state militia to resist enforcement of the judgment of the Court. Matters were tense for a time and bloodshed seemed imminent but ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson
... looking at him when he awoke. Like a wild animal, all of him was awake the instant he opened his eyes. The first he saw was the parasol, strangely obtruded between him and the sky. He did not start nor move, though his whole body seemed slightly to tense. His eyes followed down the parasol handle to the tight-clutched little fingers, and along the arm to the child's face. Straight and unblinking, he looked into her eyes, and she, returning the look, was chilled and frightened by his glittering eyes, cold ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... the only living creature in sight being a girl who was sitting on a pile of shingles at the extreme end. Matthew, barely noting that it WAS a girl, sidled past her as quickly as possible without looking at her. Had he looked he could hardly have failed to notice the tense rigidity and expectation of her attitude and expression. She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and leaders in action. Out of these came the speakers. One by one, they stepped into the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty, such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense crowd listened, hardly breathing, now it broke into wild applause. The speakers dealt with an approaching tempest, and with a gesture they checked off the storm clouds. "Protection for the manufacturing ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... level with his, revealing it bravely, perhaps defiantly. Its tense expression, with a few misery-laden lines, answered back to the inquiry of the nonchalant outsiders: 'Yes, I am his wife, his wife, the wife of the object over there, brought here to the hospital, shot in a saloon brawl.' And ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... strain in some voice of the woodwind or a ripple of the harp, it is sung in tense chorus of lower wood and horns,—soon joined by all the voices but the martial brass, ending with a soft echo ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... after some minutes of tense expectancy, the cannon opened fire, and speedily gaps were seen in the white masses. Yet the crescent never slackened its advance, except when groups halted to fire their muskets at impossible ranges. Waving their flags and intoning their prayers, the Dervishes charged ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... brown eyes looked into the soft black ones for a full minute, then, with a long-drawn breath, the tense expression in the stranger's relaxed. "I see," said the weary voice. "You are used to having your way—just as he is. I'll have to let you because I haven't any strength left to fight with. You are wonderfully kind. But—I'm not a ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... very word to use in this connection," I observed, remembering the subtly provisional character of Marlow's long sojourn amongst us. From year to year he dwelt on land as a bird rests on the branch of a tree, so tense with the power of brusque flight into its true element that it is incomprehensible why it should sit still minute after minute. The sea is the sailor's true element, and Marlow, lingering on shore, was to me an object of incredulous commiseration like a bird, which, secretly, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the people there look scornfully at me as if I belonged to Whitechapel, and the rest look suspiciously at me as if I belonged to Bond Street. My clothes are neither good enough nor bad enough. So I hurry through with the tense expression of a man who is merely using Bond Street as a thoroughfare, because it is the way to his dentist—as indeed in my case it is. But recently I did saunter in the proper way, and I took a most thrilling inventory of the principal classes of shops, the results ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, December 15, 1920 • Various
... jerk on the rope and noticed that now it was motionless, whereas before it had trembled and shifted as Rob moved along the shelf. Skookie was the first to divine what had happened. He pointed to the cord, now tense and stiff, and leaned out over the rim, peering down at the shelf where Rob ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... face turned a pasty hue, and the tip of his tongue slid along his puffed lips, but the lines of Faro Sam's face never changed, and his eyes retained the blank impassivity of a snake's as he slipped his cards. There was a sudden, tense silence. The girls pressed forward with hurried breathing and the men ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... the room changed with the passing of the sunlight—grew tense, electric, almost, one would have said, expectant; and Owen realized that the moment for ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... he swiftly adjusted a beard that swept its sable flow down his youthful chest. Then he addressed us again, still in tense, hoarse accents. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... empty, their nerves and muscles relaxed, their hearts calm and their brains cool; now she saw them when their hands held the weapons of their warfare—the tools of their craft—when their nerves and muscles were braced for the strain of the conflict or tense with the effort of toil; when their hearts beat high with the zeal of their purpose and their brains were fired with the excitement of their efforts. She had known them only in the hours of their dreaming—when, as they looked out upon life, they talked ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... nations, Olive-skinned French with clipped moustaches, Almond-eyed like Paris apaches. Rosy French with their faces shining From joy of living and love of dining. Silent Spaniards, merry Italians, Nobles, commoners, saints, rapscallions; Russians tense with the quest of truth That maddens manhood and saddens youth; Learned Norwegians hale and limber, Brown from the barques new in with timber. Oregon men of six feet seven With backs from Atlas and hearts from Heaven. ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield
... excited &c. v.; wrought up, up the qui vive[Fr], astir, sparkling; in a quiver &c. 821, in a fever, in a ferment, in a blaze, in a state of excitement; in hysterics; black in the face, overwrought, tense, taught, on a razor's edge; hot, red-hot, flushed, feverish; all of a twitter, in a pucker; with quivering lips, with tears in one's eyes. flaming; boiling over; ebullient, seething; foaming at the mouth; fuming, raging, carried ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... private car at the end of the row of coaches. No noise had come from its occupants during even the worst, or the best, of it. First tense attention and then when it was over and the superintendent had ridden away, three pairs of eyes which, turned upon each other, ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... that it is cylindrical, consisting of an elongated kettle or wooden vessel, or perhaps a section of the hollow trunk of a tree about 10 inches in diameter and from 18 to 20 inches in length, over both ends of which rawhide is stretched while wet, so that upon drying the membrane becomes hard and tense, producing, when beaten, a very hard, loud tone, which may be heard at ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... steadily, the slender line was paid out, amid a tense silence on the part of the little group at the top of the canyou. After what seemed to them hours, a sharp call from the depths reached ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... shout to Johnny who was driving big-eyed, his lips pursed with the tense purpose that held him to his work. "Turn back and land at the rancho. We'll never make Los Angeles with those damned buzzards after us. I'll have to ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... was reached. It was wide, marshy, edged with cowslips. It would take a long jump to clear it. Gething felt the back gather beneath him, the tense body flung into the air, the flight through space, then the landing well upon the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... did, Mr. Hamilton?" The detective suddenly leaned forward across his desk, his body tense, his eyes alight with fervid animation. "Are you sure Pennington Lawton ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... he heard voices—the voices of children, and toward him came two little girls, followed by a young lady. They drew near. Standing his ground, with muscles tense, Warburton glanced at the young lady's face, and could not doubt that this was Rosamund's sister; the features were much less notable than Rosamund's, but their gentle prettiness made claim of kindred with her. Forthwith he doffed his hat, and ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... as a dozen seconds or so of tense silence between them. She never once flinched. The cold question of her eyes seemed to burn its way into the man's composure. A fierce ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... steadier, now. The first great strain had subsided. He was cool, tense, now—though not a whit less determined to win at ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... is contrast always to this. I reason: I have lived as they in their inmost rites— they endure the tense nerves through the moment of ritual. I endure from moment to moment— days pass all ...
— Sea Garden • Hilda Doolittle
... behind the hovel-wall of that dense female, Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell In tortoise-nakedness, Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spread-eagle over her house-roof, And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls, ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... holly on the streets, and silver mistletoe; The surging, jeweled, ragged crowds forever come and go. And here a silken woman laughs, and there a beggar asks— And, oh, the faces, tense of lip, like mad and mocking masks. Who thinks of Bethlehem today, and one lone winter night? Who knows that in a manger-bed there breathed ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... so much better than she could have hoped for, both easier and more friendly. Eight years it lasted, then the husband died, and she mourned him with a sincere heart. She had learned to love his fine, thin-blooded nature which with a tense, egotistic, almost morbid love loved whatever belonged to it by ties of relationship or family, and cared nought for anything in all the great world outside, except for what they thought, what their opinion was—nothing else. After her husband's death she had lived chiefly for her ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... savin powder, which did not, however, produce any ill effect. When admitted she looked ill and pinched. The left thigh and leg were painful and edematous. The abdomen looked like that of the sixth month of pregnancy. The abdominal wall was tense, smooth, and without lineae albicantes. Palpation revealed a cystic immobile tumor, extending 2 inches above the umbilicus and apparently fixed by deep adhesions. The fetal parts could only be made out with ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Learn to apply readily the following principles of method: First, use the past tense in telling a story except in direct quotation. The rules of grammar require this, and it is an aid to clearness and effectiveness. For example, do not say, "So he goes" or "Then he says"; but say, "So he went" or "Then he said" (or, for variety, replied, growled, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... His jaw very tense, his back painfully stiff, Link strode heavily down the lane and out into the highroad. Chum, always eager for a walk with his god, frisked about ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... quivered when they spoke They've said brave things or tried to make a joke; Said it's not worse than trenches in the rain, Or pools of water on a chalky plain, Or bitter cold from which you stiffly woke, Or deep wet mud that left you hardly sane, Or the tense wait for "Fritz's master stroke." You seldom hear them talk of their "bad luck," And suffering has not spoiled their ready wit, And oh! you'd hardly doubt their fighting pluck, When each new operation shows their grit; Who never brag of blows for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
