Explore "The Mill Mystery" by Anna Katharine Green on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Would'st thou have that / Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life, / And live a coward in thine own esteem, / Letting "I dare not," wait upon "I would," / Like the poor cat i' the adage? / MACBETH.
He was to all appearance immediately forgotten. As with mutual consent we all turned and faced each other, Mrs. Pollard with a stern, inexorable look in her dark eye, which, while it held me enchained, caused me to involuntarily lay my hand upon the document which I had hidden in my breast She noticed the movement, and smiled darkly with a sidelong look at her son. The smile and the look affected me strangely. In them I seemed to detect something deeper than hatred and baffled rage, and when in a moment later her son responded to her glance by quietly withdrawing from the room, I felt such revolt against their secrecy that for a moment I was tempted to abandon an undertaking that promised to bring me in conflict with passions of so deep and unrelenting a nature.