Read "The Red Cockade" by Stanley J. Weyman online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
He sat silent so long, with his eyes on the table, that presently I grew nettled; wondering what ailed him, and why he did not speak and say the things that I expected. I had been so confident of the advice he would give me, that, from the first, I had tinged my story with the appropriate colour. I had let my bitterness be seen; I had suppressed no scornful word, but supplied him with all the ground he could desire for giving me the advice I supposed to be upon his lips.
And yet he did not speak. A hundred times I had heard him declare his sympathy with the people, his hatred of the corruption, the selfishness, the abuses of the Government; within the hour I had seen his eye kindle as he spoke of the fall of the Bastille. It was at his word I had burned the _carcan_; at his instance I had spent a large sum in feeding the village during the famine of the past year. Yet now -- now, when I expected him to rise up and bid me do my part, he was silent!