Read "Brandon of the Engineers" by Harold Bindloss online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The sun had sunk behind the range when Clare Kenwardine stood, musing, on a balcony of the house. Voices and footsteps reached her across the roofs, for Santa Brigida was wakening from its afternoon sleep and the traffic had begun again in the cooling streets. The girl listened vacantly, as she grappled with questions that had grown more troublesome of late.
The life she led often jarred, and yet she could find no escape. She hoped she was not unnecessarily censorious and tried to argue that after all there was no great harm in gambling, but rarely succeeded in convincing herself. Then she had deliberately thrown in her lot with her father's. When she first insisted on joining him in England, he had, for her sake, as she now realized, discouraged the plan, but had since come to depend upon her in many ways, and she could not leave him. Besides, it was too late. She had made her choice and must stick to it.