The Project Gutenberg eBook, Adam Johnstone's Son, by F. Marion Crawford

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Title: Adam Johnstone's Son

Author: F. Marion Crawford

Release Date: August 29, 2007 [eBook #22455]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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The Complete Works of F. Marion Crawford

ADAM JOHNSTONE'S SON

by

F. MARION CRAWFORD

With Frontispiece

[Illustration: "I SOMETIMES THINK THAT ONE'S PAST LIFE IS WRITTEN IN A
FOREIGN LANGUAGE," SAID MRS. BOWRING, SHUTTING THE BOOK SHE HELD.]

P. F. Collier & Son
New York

Copyright 1895, 1896, 1897
by F. Marion Crawford
All Rights Reserved

ADAM JOHNSTONE'S SON

CHAPTER I

"I sometimes think that one's past life is written in a foreign
language," said Mrs. Bowring, shutting the book she held, but keeping
the place with one smooth, thin forefinger, while her still, blue eyes
turned from her daughter's face towards the hazy hills that hemmed the
sea thirty miles to the southward. "When one wants to read it, one finds
ever so many words which one cannot understand, and one has to look them
out in a sort of unfamiliar dictionary, and try to make sense of the
sentences as best one can. Only the big things are clear."

Clare glanced at her mother, smiling innocently and half mechanically,
without much definite expression, and quite without curiosity. Youth can
be in sympathy with age, while not understanding it, while not
suspecting, perhaps, that there is anything to understand beyond the
streaked hair and the pale glance and the little torture-lines which
paint the portrait of fifty years for the eyes of twenty.

Every woman knows the calendar of her own fac