"Tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... emerges from the spell. Oftentimes, as she squats by the mat, summoning the spirits, her eyes take on a far-away stare; the veins of her face and neck stand out prominently, while the muscles of her arms and legs are tense; then, as she is possessed, she assumes the character and habits of the superior being. If it is a spirit supposed to dwell in Igorot or Kalinga land, she speaks in a dialect unfamiliar to her hearers, orders them to dance in Igorot ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... effort. His brakes shrieked, and still the car shot on with scarcely abated speed, for the wheels could secure no purchase in the thin sand of the roadway. Andy's heart stood still in sympathy as he saw the face of the driver whiten and grow tense. Charles Merchant, the son of rich John Merchant, was behind the wheel. Drunken Pat Gregg had taken the warning at last. He turned in the saddle and drove home his spurs, but even that had been too late had not Charles Merchant taken the big chance. ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... towards her. Something of the servility of his manner had gone. For the first time she looked at him closely, appreciated the tense immobility of his features, the still, penetrating light of his cold eyes. A queer premonition of trouble for a ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was short as it was tense. Once more the brave black head appeared, a blot on the foam-flecked surface, no longer battling, with dilated nostrils, against fearful odds; but lying sideways, inert . . . lifeless; . . . and a prolonged outburst of shouting, clapping, and huzzaing informed the echoing hills that the great spirit ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... tense, strained tone of her voice that she was very near the breaking-point, and his whole being yearned to comfort her and try ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... his first mad charge. She saw again, with marvellous fidelity, the whole colour-scheme just before the death of the big, brave beast: the huge arena in its unrivalled setting of mountain, sea and sky; the eager multitude, tense with expectancy; the silver-mounted bridles and trappings of the horses; the many-hued capes of the capadors; the gaily-dressed banderilleros, poising their beribboned barbs; the red flag and ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... cried, in a low, tense voice, "I must go. You have been more to me than you will ever know. May ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... eyes and looked ahead. Step by step he traced the marks on up the hill in the direction of the dugout, and, at last, silent speculation gave place to tense, low-spoken words. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... near the arch of Septimius Severus. The commentator on Winckelmann is of the same opinion with that learned person, and is incensed at Nardini for not having remarked that Cicero, in speaking of the wolf struck with lightning in the Capitol, makes use of the past tense. But, with the Abate's leave, Nardini does not positively assert the statue to be that mentioned by Cicero, and if he had, the assumption would not perhaps have been so exceedingly indiscreet. The Abate himself is obliged to own that there are marks very like ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... associated with the enslaved Negro was accidental. No sooner had they assisted the runaway slave to freedom than they forgot him. He was left to make good in the autonomous, laissez faire atmosphere of a vigorous democracy. Soon, however, his economic helplessness and inefficiency, his ignorance of the tense northern life aroused the same men who had helped him to freedom to the realization that he was of an alien race, with characteristics that made his social assimilation difficult. Where the blacks were present in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... saw a flash of light before him, and he felt a darting pain across his brow, as the keen point of the sword passed there. The blood ran down into his eyes, blinding him for the time. He could not see the figure before him, but he knew that it was tense and waiting. He groped with his cutlass, but touching only thin air he threw it away, and clapped his hands to his eyes to keep ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the guest, for in Chichikov's face there dawned a sort of tense expression, and it reddened as though its owner were striving to express something not easy to put into words. True enough, Manilov was now destined to hear such strange and unexpected things as never before had ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... he has no such word as Fatherland, and the idea which he supposes corresponds to it is nothing but the swing of a roaring chorus to a patriotic song. Also he is a muddler and a slacker, because tense and continuous work means thought; and he is lazy and fat in the head. But as long as he is himself, and grumbles, it does not matter. Given a furious Opposition screaming for the disgrace of tyrannical ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... see the curved sabres of our comrades rising against the clear sky to slash down upon the leather schapskas of our foe! We waited for the word that was to let loose the pent-up energy of all those tense muscles. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... turbulence and slaughter and racial transplanting, see how some Roman words stay and refuse to go, knowing as little of retreat as a Roman legion! "Chester" and "coin," as good old English terminals, are tense with interest, since they as plainly record history as did minstrels in old castle hall. Chester is the Roman "castra," camp, and where the name occurs across Britain, indicates with undeviating fidelity that there, in remote decades, Roman legions camped and the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a war weapon, a stone tied in a crotched stick, from the heap of wedding gifts, and smites PADAHOON to the earth, standing threateningly over him. The others stiffen into tense attitudes, drawing their blankets tighter, their eyes burning bright. PADAHOON draws the knife that hangs in a ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... first, and even the recollection that there was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could not quell the rising disgust and indignation. One likes to be done well by in every tense, past, present, and future. And here was Peter capable five years ago of leaving only two hundred apiece to his own brothers and sisters, and only a hundred apiece to his own nephews and nieces: the Garths were not mentioned, but Mrs. Vincy ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... came to an end after a tense two days. The packed court-room fat in a terrible silence awaiting the ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... lifted his head. He was sniffing the cool morning air. Slowly the tawny-golden shape of the big buckskin turned, head up and nostrils rounded in tense rings. Waring glanced across the canon. The farther wall was still dim in the half-light. In a few minutes the trail would become distinct. Dropping from the ledge, he stepped to his saddle. Dex evidently heard him, for he twitched back one ear, but maintained his attitude of keen interest ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... tense and damp with the dews of thought. In that head you see the great future, careless of the black and white stones; and even when you turn to the voluptuous beauty of the mouth, the impression remains so strong, that Russia's snows, and mountains of the slain, seem ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... eyes while the doctor counted his pulse. During the ensuing silence it struck Esther that both women were more worried than was necessary. The Frenchwoman in particular watched with an air of tense apprehension. ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... at the fellow's contortions, the plump man sprang (marvellous nimble) and dashed out the light and, as I stepped from before the window, I heard the lattice go with a crash of glass. Followed a long, tense moment wherein we all (as I judge) held our breath, for though the storm yet roared beyond the shattered casement, within was a comparative quiet. Thus, as I stood in the dark listening for some rustle, some stealthy creeping step to guide my next blow, I thrust away my pistol and changing my ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... mean?" demanded Bob in a tense voice. "Name somebody. I suppose the fact that Germany has murdered a lot of Americans has nothing to do with our going ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... head to foot. What was that Chippy had worked in among his sobs and moans? B.P.—the motto of their order—'Be Prepared.' Dick held himself tense as ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... to which the language has attained. A proper case system may not have been established in a language by the fixing of case particles, or, having been established, it may change by the increase or diminution of the number of cases. A tense system also has a beginning, a growth, and a decadence. A mode system is variable in the various stages of the history of a language. In like manner a pronominal system undergoes changes. Particles may be prefixed, infixed, or affixed in compounded words, and which one of these methods ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let his tense nerves, muscles, and tendons sag—he pretended someone had struck him with a dose of curare. He let his breath out slowly and opened ...
— Damned If You Don't • Gordon Randall Garrett
... de force. Take for example the extraordinarily vital passage in volume two—when Harriet is insulted by Donald at a soda fountain, or the sordidly realistic moment in volume three when she is horsewhipped by Frederick on Long Beach—and above all perhaps those few tense seconds in volume one when Norman having lured her to Childs' for supper brands her left thigh with a flat-iron. Immediately upon publication of this masterpiece Spout received five hundred and ninety-four letters from anxious mothers, eight hundred and two requests for sexual ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... Houssa sentry, who shouldered his arms in salute. Bones halted before the soldier and stared at him. Somehow, the watchers on the stoep knew that he was staring—there was something so fixed, so tense in his attitude. Then, without warning, the sentry's hand passed across his body, and the rifle ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and yet not all unintelligent. Those who are familiar with the healthy type of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class. ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... the buzzing whispers went about the court again, shrilling high, but instantaneously they died down, and the same tense silence prevailed. But from the back of the court there was a stir, and the judge seeing what it was that caused it waited, while Mrs. Assheton moved from her place, and made her way to the front of the dock in which ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... by the English perfect tense. There are many other cases in these poems where the preterit had best be rendered ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... lights. Life had changed for me during the last few weeks. The old, placid days of content were over; already I was in a new world, a world of bigger things, where the great game was being played, with the tense desperateness of those who gamble with life and death. I had not sought the change! Rather it had been forced upon me. I had no ambitions to gratify; the old life had pleased me very well. I had quitted it simply upon compulsion. And here I was with unfamiliar ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on the mossy river-bank in the dappled, golden sunlight. Frowning eyes fixed on a sweeping eddy, she watched without seeing the racing current. Her slim, supple body, crouched and tense, was motionless, but her soul seethed tumultuously. In the bosom of her coarse linsey gown lay hidden a note. Through it destiny called her to ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... and the brothers returned with one mind to the house. Here, as after their ablutions they sat down to the evening meal, the archbishop remembered poor Marmaduke, and despatched to him one of his thirty household chaplains. Marmaduke was found fast asleep over the second tense of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... instead of the swift thud-thud of the screw that had pounded for many weeks. It was late; so late that most of the ship's lights were extinguished. But all through her was a feeling of pulsating life, of unrest, of a kind of tense excitement, of long-pent expectation. There were low voices everywhere; feet paced the decks; along the port railings on each deck soldiers were clustered thickly, looking out across the grey, tossing sea to a winking light that flashed and twinkled out of ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... which nouns and verbs are its only elements, is an established fact. In the gradual multiplication of parts of speech out of these primary ones—in the differentiation of verbs into active and passive, of nouns into abstract and concrete—in the rise of distinctions of mood, tense, person, of number and case—in the formation of auxiliary verbs, of adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles—in the divergence of those orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... went far at the gallop, and the beat of hoofs rose up, dulled a little, in a wild staccato drumming. There was an insistent crunching beneath the runners, and a fine mist of snow beat against the sleigh, but the girl leaning forward, a tense figure, with nerveless hands clenched upon the reins, saw nothing but the blue-grey riband of trail that steadily unrolled itself before her. At length, however, a blurred mass, which she knew to be a birch bluff, grew out of the white waste, and presently a cluster of darker smudges shot up ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future tense, and also the circumstance that his father had been lost in a book according to his now confirmed custom of evening ease. This proved him not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... the darkness to some unknown destination. I sat in a carriage quite at the rear end of the train, in a corner seat, and was leaning out of the open window, peering into the darkness, when, suddenly, a voice, which seemed to speak out of the air, said to me in a low, distinct, in-tense tone, the mere recollection of which makes me shudder,—"The sentence is being carried out even now. You are all of you lost. Ahead of the train is a frightful precipice of monstrous height, and at its base beats a fathomless sea. The railway ends only with the abyss, Over that will the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... day; And a growling gun when the fight was won, and the twilight flickered gray, I have seen men die with their chins raised high, and a curse that was half a prayer— I have fought alone when a comrade's groan was tense on ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... the art and eloquence of a finished actor, read his work with magnetic effect. When he finished Frohman sat absolutely still for nearly five minutes. It seemed hours to the playwright, who awaited the decision with tense interest. Finally Frohman ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... sea-eagle is not a leisurely eater. He likes to gulp; and so when he has indiscreetly blundered on a porcupine he frequently unlocks his talons and shakes himself free, while the fish, inflated to the last gulp, floats away high and light, bearing on its tense silvery-white side the crimson ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the gunner never in this life explained. Poised expectant in the lull of the fray, he was trembling under the tense silence, when he saw the impetuous Don Rodrigo dart up the slope, full against the muzzle. At the same instant he heard shouts of warning behind him, and he heard the tiradores there above firing at someone almost at his feet. But the figure that had scaled up the back of the hill, crawling around ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... in the introduction, and in the most proper spirit displayed a single-minded ambition to get back to play, and this I thought an excellent and admirable point in your character. You were also,—I use the past tense with a view to the time when you shall read rather than to that when I am writing,—a very pretty boy, and to my European views startlingly self-possessed. My time of observation was so limited that you must pardon me ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... Spirit-taught man, who ponders the words of the Scripture day after day and year after year, will become convinced that the wisdom of God is in the very words, as well as in the thought which the words endeavour to convey. A change of a word, or letter, or a tense, or case, or number, in many instances would land us into contradiction or untruth, but taking the words exactly as written, difficulties disappear and truth shines forth. The Divine origin of nature shines forth more clearly in the use of a microscope as we see the perfection ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... anger and hatred grew dark in the giant's face, and the stranger saw the big hands clench and the huge frame grow tense with passion. Then, as if striving to be not ungracious, the woodsman said in a somewhat softer tone, "You can't see much of it, this evening, though, 'count of the mists. It'll fair up by morning, I reckon. You can see a long way from here, ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... grew tense, then there was a gathering together of the best in him and the fence was taken as only ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... pipe in his jacket pocket. "You know, Camberton, you keep referring to Wendell in the present tense. I thought ...
— Suite Mentale • Gordon Randall Garrett
... waited, every nerve and fibre of him tense for her answer. While he had been speaking, the onrush of the storm had blotted out the moon. There was only darkness there in the garden—deep, dense darkness, so thick he could not even see the ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... always did at Kent's astonishing oaths. At the sound of the laughter, old Lizzie gave a sigh as though some of her own tense nerves had relaxed. ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... best must be for a woman, its strange complex of passion and maternity. She wondered if it would ever come to her. She rather thought not. But she was also conscious of a new attitude among the three at the table, her mother's tense watchfulness, her father's slightly squared shoulders, and across from her her grandfather, fingering the stem of his ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... copious, we were not sufficiently acquainted with it to know; but it is certainly very imperfect, for it is almost totally without inflexion, both of nouns and verbs. Few of the nouns have more than one case, and few of the verbs more than one tense; yet we found no great difficulty in making ourselves mutually understood, however strange it may appear ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the fingers on the palm side. Among the causes are a blow, scratch, or puncture. Often there is no apparent cause, but in some manner the germs of inflammation gain entrance. The end of the finger becomes hot and tense, and throbs with sometimes almost unbearable pain. If the inflammation is chiefly of the surface there may be much redness, but if mainly of the deeper parts the skin may be but little reddened or the surface may be actually ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... qualities of the women of other countries and gives unity to the mixture by her wit, that truly French product, which enlivens, sanctions, justifies, and varies all, thus relieving the monotony of a sentiment which rests on a single tense of a single verb. The Frenchwoman loves always, without abatement and without fatigue, in public or in solitude. In public she uses a tone which has meaning for one only; she speaks by silence; she looks at you with lowered eyelids. If the occasion ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Persian story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry, almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... this world succeeds to revolution. All that I say in this paper is in a paulo-past tense. The Monterey of last year exists no longer. A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway. Three sets of diners sit down successively to table. Invaluable toilettes figure along the beach and between the live oaks; and Monterey is advertised in the newspapers, and posted in the waiting-rooms ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this time I was feeling confidence in my car and in my powers to manage it. Once clear of the houses again, I let her rip for all she was worth; we simply flew along. With my right hand on the wheel, my feet on the two pedals, I sat as tense as a fiddle string, my one object to peer ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... of tense dread. He begins to take a less somber view of the situation. Possibly his missing hat had been found and identified. Perhaps the London public thought both had been drowned. Might it not be that no search was made for him, his death being conceded? Strange if detectives were ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... about David except a little smoke in the chimney of his throat. But the young lady did not wait for more silence to render things more tense. She stepped forward into the doorway beside his mother and peered curiously in, looking up at the smoke-blackened joists, at the black cross sticks on which the links of sausages were hung, at the little ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... beneath the sunset's planet A black ship walk over the crimson ocean,— Its pennon streaming on the blasts that fan it, 155 Its sails and ropes all tense and without motion, Like the dark ghost of the unburied even Striding athwart ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Belgian owner, and one or two of the servants, who defended their master. To the horror and righteous anger of the American, the German officer took his place at the head of the table, waved the American to his seat, and ordered the young Belgian woman to perform her duties as hostess. In that tense moment, it was a matter of life and death to disobey. That German officer had his way, not only with the young Belgian wife, half dazed, half crazed, wholly broken in spirit, but with the American whom ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... themselves by using their hands; as they are able in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, however impossible it may seem, to release their hands by loosening the knots next their wrists. Sometimes they do this by twisting the rope between their wrists; sometimes it is by keeping their muscles as tense as possible during the tying, so that when relaxed there shall be some slack. Most "committees" know so little about tying, that anybody, by a little pulling, slipping, and wriggling, could slip his hands out ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... least intelligent, and lacked that spark which to him signified vision. In past years he had had a rooted belief that the standard wife was a burden who not only robbed one of mobility, but also demanded her portion of all moments, however individual, absorbed or tense they might be. In such circumstances there was nothing around which he could build a mental fence and call ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... A very tense condition of affairs existed, when on January 31 I asked for a special interview with Admiral Koltchak that I might introduce my colleague and comrade, Colonel Johnson, and talk over the situation. The admiral was out walking by the river, quite unattended, but in ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... from the girl's face and sparkling eyes. She sat on the floor, her hands round her knees, defiance in every tense feature. Mrs. Friend was conscious of renewed alarm and astonishment, and at last found the nerve ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so, and then, with a wild scramble, found a foothold. Ida, who was conscious that her heart was beating painfully fast, wondered what kept him from falling. There was not a crevice or a cranny that she could see; but she could not see anything very well, except the tense figure stretched against the stone and the set, white face. Dark pines and foaming ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... but let us sit awhile with nubiferous, or, if we may coin a word, nepheligenous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now the over-tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, and a buzz, like that which comes over one who stops after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran over, and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and Knight, after remaining upon the churchyard stile a few minutes longer, turned back again towards the building. His usual course was now to light a cigar or pipe, and indulge in a quiet meditation. But to-night his mind was too tense to bethink itself of such a solace. He merely walked round to the site of the fallen tower, and sat himself down upon some of the large stones which had composed it until this day, when the chain of circumstance originated by Stephen ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... saddle. Sinker's death had come like a white-hot flash of lightning from the bulked clouds that had shadowed disaster impending—and in that shadow the three men rode silently toward the north. Again Corliss questioned Sundown. Tense with the stress of an emotion that all but sealed his lips, Sundown turned his white face to Corliss and whispered, "Wait!" The rancher felt that that one terse, whispered word implied more than ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... up a ring of tense, pale faces—not one of which, Silvestro saw, would rest content with that. The interrogatories began, a dropping fire ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... And when the last little flame flickered and went out I grasped the shotgun which I had laid at my side and actually turned the muzzle in the direction of the now invisible entrance, my thumb on one of the hammers, ready to cock the piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid and tense. But later I laid down the weapon with a sense of shame and mortification. What did I fear, and why?—I, to whom the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... that they had lied—they had all lied! Burr had never courted Dorothy Fair. She believed, with her whole heart and soul, that he loved her and her alone. And, indeed, she was at that time, at that minute, right and not deceived; for Burr Gordon was one of those who can encompass love in one tense only, and that the present; and they who love only in the present, hampered by no memories and no dreams, yield out love's sweetness fully. All Burr Gordon's soul was in his kisses and his fond eyes, and her own crept out to ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Owing to the place Hugh had taken at one side of the run, Grace, at first, did not perceive him. Anxiety, almost fright, showed in her face; there passed through her a thrill of consternation at the thought that perhaps he had not received her telegram. The tense figure clasped the travelling-bag convulsively, and her brown eyes flashed a look of alarm over the waiting throng. Another moment and their gaze met; a voice ringing with happiness assailed her; her heart throbbed again, and the blood ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;—a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... for Tam amongst the stars," said that worthy young man as he backed out of Blackie's office, "the disgustin' incivility o' the Hoon has aroosed the fichtin' spirit o' the dead-an'-gone MacTavishes. Every fiber in ma body, includin' ma suspenders, is tense wi' rage an' horror." ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... stared in surprise. She feared that her friend had turned faint with emotion, but when Dreda had cleared herself from the crowded forms she marched quietly up the room towards the platform. The unfolded essay was in her hand, her face was as white as the paper itself. The applause died away into a tense, uneasy silence. Something had gone ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... waters and ways of the air From thy forehead made bare, From the gleam of thy bow-bearing hand? Hast thou set not thy right hand again to the string, With the back-bowed horns bent sharp for a spring 1410 And the barbed shaft drawn, Till the shrill steel sing and the tense nerve ring That pierces the heart of the dark with dawn, O huntsman, O king, When the flame of thy face hath twilight in chase As a hound hath a blood-mottled fawn? He has glanced into golden the grey sea-strands, And the clouds are shot through with the fires of his hands, And the ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... awful," she declared, in tense tones. "When Jim went to bed, everything was perfectly quiet. And then, when he woke up, all of a sudden, there beside ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... and she looked down at her son. The child lay for a moment, wide-eyed and tense. Then some indescribable quality seemed to make him momentarily too large, too tall, for the ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... more readily appeals to the Mexican. The bull-fight, with its accompaniments of showy dress, tense excitement, and elements of danger and bloodshed, is his favourite amusement. Military parades and political functions enter largely into the distractions of polite life, as indeed is the case throughout Spanish-America generally. Military titles are exceedingly numerous. ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... her arms high and stood on tiptoe to meet them. She shook her hair loose from its plait and threw back her head, loving it all—the wind and the dark sky and the tense feeling of readiness for the storm with which everything seemed charged—with an almost pagan joy. She even began a dance, a fantastic sort of lonely quadrille (if it could be given any special name), there on the flagged walk by the end of ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... the old gardener and I again awaited the cry of our feathered friends, but our waiting, like that of so many others, was in vain. The wild ducks are a thing of the past. Where have they gone? No one knows, no one has ever seen them. And in the tense hush of the Autumn nights, above the distant rumble of the cannon rose only the plaintive cry of stray dogs baying ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... friendliness of manner and mind. Mrs. Browning will sit buried up in a large easy-chair listening and talking very quietly and pleasantly. Very unaffected is she.... I have hundreds of statues in my head, but they are in the future tense. Powers I knew very well in Florence. He is a man of great mechanical talent and natural strength of perception, but with no poetry in his composition, and I think no creative power.... I have been to hear Allegri's 'Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Hamlet is no mean test of a translator's ability—this quick, tense scene, one of the finest in dramatic literature. Foersom did it with conspicuous success. Blom has reduced it to the ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... hardly have done this, but his boyish love for the girls and their boat could not be restrained. Then they waved, and the maroon and white flag stood out tense and defiant like some ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... stood, she moved her foot and scratched the sole of her boot on the ice to level a roughness in the step, and at once she saw Chayne and the guide in front drive the picks of their axes hard into the slope at their side and stand tense as if expecting a jerk upon the rope. Afterward they both looked round at her, and seeing she was safe turned back again to their work, the guide cutting the steps, Chayne ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... waited. The silence was so tense that it seemed to bear the impact of her pulses; it throbbed and quivered with pain. Outside, the sound of the pebbles, crunched under Pilkington's footsteps, became a concert ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... forms all of the distinctions of mood and tense, person and number, found in the English, and form their participles, and are changed into verbal or participial nouns; and these modifications are for, the ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... The lieutenant looked down into the water over the stern, and saw that the schooner was already raising the mud in her wane. Then he went forward along the deck. His men were crouching down along by the low rail, and there was a tense quietness of expectation about them. The lieutenant looked them over as he passed them. "Johnson," he said, "do you take the lead and line and go forward and sound a bit." Then to the others: "Now, my men, the moment we run her aboard, you get aboard of her as quick as you can, do you understand? ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... good, not hating ill; On his tense chords all strokes are felt, The good, the bad, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... more. Captain Jethro was standing erect beside his chair. When, at last, he did speak, his tone was still more tense and threatening. Even the shallowest mind in that room—and, as Miss Phipps had said, practically every "crank" within ten miles was present—even the shallowest realized that something ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of this speech upon Trent was curious. For an instant his face was flooded with the emotion of surprise. As this passed away he gradually drew himself together as he sat into a tense attitude. He looked, she thought as she saw his knuckles grow white on the arms of the chair, like a man prepared for pain under the hand of the surgeon. But all he said, in a voice lower than his usual tone, was: "I had no ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... became less tense as he noted the faces of his fellows; for in their eyes he read jealousy, rank and stark, and it warmed him to the marrow. In the next instant his warmth rose to fever heat, and malice twisted his features; Dolores had taken another cup, and now ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... telling in other places. Donnegan turned and saw in the shadow and about the edges of the room a host of drawn, tense faces and burning eyes. Never while they lived would they forget ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... gazing upon that appalling scene for some minutes, while the ruddy shadows of the flaming observatory lit their tense faces. ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich
... The tense silence was broken. Sweet tones with throbbing notes of appeal, carrying with them that Christmas message of immeasurable love, penetrated every corner of the house of worship and the heart of every listener. ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... at the rail did not turn, nor for a moment did she answer. He could see her profile clear-cut as a cameo in the almost vivid light, and in that light her eyes were wide and filled with a dusky fire, and her lips were parted a little, and her slim body was tense as she looked at the wonder of the moon silhouetting the cragged castles of the peaks, up where the soft, gray ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... eagerness with which he had approached Josephine disappeared from his face. He confronted Phipps, who had also risen to his feet, as a right-living man should confront his enemy. There was a second or two of tense silence, broken by Phipps, who was the first ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eversion, flexion, and abduction, but the shortening is inconsiderable. The ilio-psoas and [inverted Y]-ligament are tense. The head of the femur may be felt in the groin, with the femoral vessels over, or to one or other side of it. There is sometimes pain and numbness in the distribution of the femoral (anterior crural) nerve. The prominence of the great ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... has gone by, the atmosphere is still tense and surcharged with feeling, and the situation remains unaltered. However, the newspapers have changed their headings from "Outrage" to "Affair," although they are still devoting columns and columns to the matter. Protest meetings are still being held, ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the last strip of water that lapped the island. Every one seemed tense with an anxious sort ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis
... respects to the future lady of Rawdon Manor, and I thank God for permitting me to see this hour. Most welcome, Lady Ethel, to the rights you inherit, and the rights you have bought." It was a moment hardly likely to be duplicated in any life, and Ethel escaped from its tense emotions as soon as possible. She could not speak, her heart was too full of joy and wonder. There are souls that say little and love ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... a final check of the controls and circuitry, then put in the last call to the tense little group in Dulaq's room. All ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... of in the past tense, as we speak of the dead, was not pleasant to Sir Francis, walking behind Geoffrey on ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... The tense lines about the girl's mouth disappeared slowly as she passed a small brown hand across her forehead and ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... drawing herself up, erect and tense, her hands behind her head; "now, I am ready for him. Let him try such ways again—if ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... prim white mirror that capped her prim white bureau and stood staring up into her own entrancing, bright-colored Novia Scotian reflection with tense and ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A tremendous ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... plan rushed through Quin's mind, only to be impatiently discarded. He sat tense and still, with his clenched hands rammed in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the black square of the window. Sometimes dim objects flew past, and now and then sharp, vivid lights stabbed the darkness. Once the smelting-pots of a huge iron foundry belched ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... dramas were variously and pithily described as The Picture with the Punch Powerful—The Smashing Five-Reel Masterpiece—A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations—Six Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... sitting behind him, and said, "My friend Mr. Beechtree here has documentary evidence of this, which I will lay before the committee shortly." When, after long working up to it, he gave the suspected member of the Secretariat the name of Wilbraham, it fell on the tense attention of the whole table. Henry, looking up to watch its reception, saw surprise on many faces, incredulity on several, pleasure on more, amusement on a few. He met also the blue eyes of Mr. Macdermott fixed on him with a smile of cynical admiration. Macdermott would doubtless ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... curious, tense and dramatic. Little Jimmy, the bartender, who had leaned forward to listen, stood with his mouth slightly open and the cocktail-shaker which was in his hand leaked drops upon the counter. The first conscious impulse of everybody seemed to be to glance suspiciously ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... how heavily the disgrace and disaster of 1870 lie upon the French heart will admit that it is fair to say that all their life this crowd had lived for this moment. Now that it had come, they took it with tense white looks upon their faces. But not a cheer, not a cry, not a shaking of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe in his tense gravity. Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... out in a sharp tone, not quite nervous, but thin and worn. Miriam's attitude grew tense. Ford took a step forward from the fireside. With his arm flung over the back of his chair, and his knee resting on the seat of it, he strained across the table, as if to annihilate the space between Wayne ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... gold, waist-high, Dean Rawson stood tense and rigid. Behind him the great cave-room swarmed with warriors, leaders, doubtless, of the unholy hordes. But beyond the barrier were the real leaders of the Mole-men tribes—Phee-e-al, ruler in chief, ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... increased. Like the ghost of a great wind it moaned and sighed about us. Little by little a new note crept in—a sibilant, metallic note as of a tense sheet of silk drawn rapidly over ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... its Eden-like nakedness. The creatures whom I met in the ways and by ways of Parisian life, whose gestures and attitudes I devoured with my eyes, and whose souls I hungered to know, awoke in me a tense irresponsible curiosity, but that was all,—I despised, I hated them, thought them contemptible, and to select them as subjects of artistic treatment, could not then, might never, have occurred to me, had the suggestion to do so not come direct to me from ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... seethe, boil, simmer, foam, fume, flame, rage, rave; run mad &c (passion) 825. Adj. excited &c v.; wrought up, up the qui vive [Fr.], astir, sparkling; in a quiver &c 821, in a fever, in a ferment, in a blaze, in a state of excitement; in hysterics; black in the face, overwrought, tense, taught, on a razor's edge; hot, red-hot, flushed, feverish; all of a twitter, in a pucker; with quivering lips, with tears in one's eyes. flaming; boiling over; ebullient, seething; foaming at the mouth; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... downtown, and Kennedy hurried into the house, bidding us stand back. With a long pair of tongs he seized the bomb firmly. It was a tense moment. Suppose his hand should unnecessarily tremble, or he should tip it just a bit - it might explode and blow him to atoms. Keeping it perfectly horizontal he carried it carefully out to the waiting automobile and placed it ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the ensuing day shone upon tense, agitated, eager faces gradually inflamed to fierceness. The Royalists began to fear for their belongings; in order to protect themselves, infected as they, too, were by the general horror which emanated from the unknown, they admitted ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... are best shown in the form in which they are prefixed to a verb. The following are examples of the verb katkahtos, I see (root atkahto) and kenonwes, I love (root nonwe), as conjugated in the present tense:— ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... assembled and righted at the first conscious grasp of this argument, as a laboring, buffeted ship rights when its shifted cargo is flung back to place by the shock of a mighty surge. Nature was on guard again in a moment, straining and tense in its sentry over the habitation of a soul so nearly deserted but a minute before. Morgan listened, sweating in the ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... down the tense muscles, then up to the manly shoulder-blades. "Why, boy, you are built like ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... Philadelphia: "Not one line in the entire book that is not tense with thought and feeling. With all readers who crave mental stimulation ... 'Visions and Revisions' is sure of ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... a tense pause. A drop of perspiration rolled down his cheek-bone and anchored itself stickily on the angle of his jaw. It tickled abominably, but he did not dare to move for fear of unleashing the scream which brooded over the situation ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... escape was still in front, and, with the utmost energy, power, and skill at his command, Monteith Sterry darted ahead. His crouching body, the head well in advance, somewhat after the manner of a racing bicyclist on the home-stretch, his compressed lips, his flashing eyes, with every muscle tense, were proof that he knew it had now become a struggle of life ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... beyond the point of relapse into absolute, unknowing slumber. There was coming to him a sharpness of perception which affected the quiescence of his enjoyment. He rose to a sitting posture and looked about him. At once his eyes flashed, every nerve and muscle became tense and the blood leaped turbulently in his veins. He had seen that for which he had come into this region, the girl who had so reached his rude, careless heart. Lightfoot was ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... unemployed, to arm them, and to send them out as officials of the United States to do whatsoever was desired by the railroads. They were not under the control of the army or of responsible United States officials, and their intrusion into a situation so tense and critical as that then existing in Chicago was certain to produce trouble. And the fact is, the lawlessness that prevailed in Chicago during that strike began only after the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the lust of him and the utter abandonment to the hazard of the game. Pitiless he looked, with clenched teeth just showing between the loose lips drawn back in a grin that was half-snarl, half-involuntary contraction of muscles sympathetically tense. ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... in Elocution. She cannot become a successful teacher until she studies the pronunciation of words. Not only did she permit mistakes made by the pupils to pass unnoticed, but she mis-pronounced many words herself, hos-pit-a-ble, for hos-pi-ta-ble, in-tense for in-tense, etc.; the errors consisted chiefly in changing the accented syllable. In the word machination, however, though the accent was correctly marked, she taught the class to call it "mash-in-a-tion." There can be no possible excuse for such carelessness, or rather ignorance, since ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... through life and could be readily amused. Then he saw Bertram, and, starting, made as if he would pass the entrance to the gallery, and Blanche turned her surprised glance upon her husband. Bertram's hand was tightly closed on the glasses he held and his face was tense and flushed, but he stepped forward with a ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... I have never seen in an identical form on the mainland. It is made like a bow, with a tense string of fibre. One end of the bow is placed against the mouth, and the string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick, while with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife- ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and hit the scramble button. Three minutes later two F-86's were headed UFOward. They soon disappeared but their vapor trails kept the tense crowd informed ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... walked away. He was quite warm and tense now—almost nervous. It was quite clear to him that he had done or was contemplating perhaps a very treacherous thing. Under the current code of society he had no right to do it. It was against the rules, as they were understood by everybody. Her father, for instance—his ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... not reply for a moment or two, but stood tense and strained. His eyes, his whole attitude showed excitement, ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... alone in the farm, in all that landscape the only living thing at the moment, except for the animals. A tense energy of will seemed to possess her. She was defending herself—defending Ellesborough—and their joint lives. How was she going to do it? She didn't know. But the passion in her blood would give her strength—would see ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stared him full in the face for a moment without the quiver of an eyelid, her fine figure tense, erect, cold, as ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... commissioner," began the accused, "this here thing happens last Thursday, just as Captain Meagher is telling you." He had slipped already into the policeman's trick of detailing a past event in the present tense. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... France, and of a few matters connected with the Dreyfus case, then kept secret but now public property. And had I to write anything of the kind at the present time, I should, I think, have but few words to alter beyond substituting the past for the present or future tense. In one respect I was mistaken. I did not imagine the truth to be quite so near at hand. Since January 1898, however, nine-tenths of it have been revealed and the rest must now soon follow. And I hold, as all hold who know the inner workings of l'Affaire Dreyfus, that M. ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... with your look and your reputation," she said calmly, "was worth a woman's looking up. When that woman had need for a man." Her eyes were glittering now; she leaned forward, suddenly rigid and tense and breathing hard. "When I have found a man who stakes ten thousand, twenty thousand on one throw and is not moved; who returns ten thousand in rage because a word of pity goes with it, am I to ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... as a miracle—it was an answer to his prayer. And it found him ready. The chance was offered him, and he would not fail—not he! He did not falter for a second. He knew just what he had to do, and he was ready—resolute, and alert, and tense. ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... his position as mayor. Not that office, but only the fact that he was Felicity's husband, would give him an entrance into the bishop's house, and the claim seemed to him boastful and vulgar. He rose abruptly to his feet, every muscle tense. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... pecus, bibit Non pessime, stertit sepultum crapula, Operam veneri dat, et voluptatum assecla Est omnium. Idne est mortuum esse mundo? Aliter interpretare. Mortui sunt Hercule Mundo cucullati, quod inors tense sunt onus, Ad rem utiles nullam, nisi ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... replied. "I deny nothing of what I have said, and your attitude has made me believe less in your religion than ever. Why"—and his voice became tense and bitter—"I'm willing to allow my religion to be tested by this election. I have not uttered one wrong word about you. I have done nothing to defame your character, in spite of what has passed. And yet you have sneered at my 'ignorant atheism and blatant unbelief.' Is that religion? ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking |
