Explore "The Hocussing of Cigarette" by Baroness Emmuska Orczy on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The man in the corner looked at me through his bone-rimmed spectacles, and his mild blue eyes gazed pleasantly into mine.
"You may well imagine," he continued, after a while, "what a thunderbolt such a catastrophe means to those whose hopes of a fortune rested upon the fitness of the bay mare. Mr. Keeson lost his temper for an instant, they say-but for one instant only. When he was hastily summoned at six o'clock in the morning to Cigarette's stables, and saw her lying on the straw, rigid and with glassy eyes, he raised his heavy riding-whip over the head of Cockram. Some assert that he actually struck him, and that the groom was too wretched and too dazed to resent either words or blows. After a good deal of hesitation he reluctantly admitted that for the first time since Cigarette had been in his charge he had slept long and heavily.