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More "Dumbly" Quotes from Famous Books



... by Perigal's letter, but, in her heart of hearts, something told her that, despite his brave words, the marriage was indefinitely postponed; indeed, it was more than doubtful if it would ever take place at all. She suffered, dumbly, despairingly; her torments were the more poignant because she realised that the man she loved beyond anything in the world must be acutely distressed at this unexpected confounding of his hopes. Her head throbbed with dull pains which gradually increased in ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... silence that followed the man and woman stood gazing dumbly at each other, and for a brief moment love and faith hung quivering in the balance. Then the balance tilted. The heavy burden of suspicion weighed it down, and without another word Eliot turned and ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... with which they dominated her, resisting him dumbly with tight-locked lips till he held her palpitating in ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... tongues out, their eyes shining like balls of fire. They were just entering the water to come across to her. They fascinated her by their very fierceness. Forgetting where she was for the instant, she stared dumbly at them until called to life and action by a scream from the locomotive's whistle. Then she sprang from the track just in the nick of time. She actually laughed as she saw two grayish-white wolf-tails bob here and there among the sage brush, as the wolves ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... who knows? perhaps the woman would feel for them and let them have it. The jeune premier went off, and half an hour later returned with a bottle of brandy and some castor-oil. Shtchiptsov was sitting motionless, as before, on the bed, gazing dumbly at the floor. He drank the castor-oil offered him by his friend like an automaton, with no consciousness of what he was doing. Like an automaton he sat afterwards at the table, and drank tea and brandy; mechanically he emptied the whole bottle and let the jeune premier put him to bed. The latter ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... in objects less expressive; they were men who did not fear their thoughts, who looked to the past for their greatest pleasures. And now for Rainham the whole of life was a thing so essentially weary and flavourless that the ennui of little things seemed hardly worth consideration. He was dumbly content to let destiny lead him whither it would, without apprehension, without expectation. Oswyn had asked him, one evening, just before they parted on the doorstep of the club, with a certain abruptness which the other had long since learnt to understand, why he was in London ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... from his face and there was a commanding firmness in the grip that fell on the young engineer's arm. Howland was conscious that things were twisting about him and that there was a strange weakness in his limbs. Dumbly he raised his hands to his head, which hurt him until he felt as if he must ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... Most of those present had known Fillmore Nicholas as an impecunious young man who could make a tweed suit last longer than one would have believed possible; they had called him "Fill" and helped him in more than usually lean times with small loans: but to-night they had eyed the waistcoat dumbly and shrank back abashed. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... of them, have their whims and fancies, and I never looked at myself in the glass on high days and holidays, when a festive garb was desirable, without a scornful protest, dumbly uttered, against so shining a name. There was such a choice, and I would rather have been Deborah or Leah, or even plain Susan, or Molly; anything homely, that would have suited my dark, low-browed face. Tall and angular, and hard-featured—what business had I with ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... but for a moment, in a rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly eloquent ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... motion, With a stately, slow surprise, From their earthward-bound devotion Lifting up your languid eyes— Would you freeze my too loud boldness, Dumbly smiling as you go, One faint frown of distant coldness Flitting fast ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... looked at them as helplessly as a frightened child. "The air!" he groaned. "It is hot!" and then he held out his hand to the princess, and showed her a flake of soot on it, and he dumbly pointed to others that ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben

... at him dumbly. She began to realize that the knightly spirit of those gallant, long dead gentlemen was indeed descended upon the last of their house, that he burnt with the same pure fire which had long ago lighted them through quest and adventure, and she was a little afraid with an almost superstitious ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... rent from thee thy substance and thy arms, Thy altars, country,—save thy memories, all. Ah! here, where yet a ray of glory lingers, Let a light shine unto all generous souls, And be Italia's hope! Unto these stones Oft came Vittorio[8] for inspiration, Wroth to his country's gods. Dumbly he roved Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously Brooding upon the heavens and the fields; Then when no living aspect could console, Here rested the Austere, upon his face Death's pallor and the deathless ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells

... house along the road was not shut up and the dooryard deserted—for everybody was going to the barbecue. All but the Dickerson family. Sam was at work in the fields, and the haggard Mrs. Dickerson looked dumbly from her porch, with a crying baby in her scrawny arms as the ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... matured, And the blows were three That time ensured On her, which she dumbly endured; And one on me - ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy

... had swiftly frozen into an implacable sternness which struck fear to the childish heart of his wife, and she obeyed him dumbly. Dropping weakly upon a chair, she added her sobs to those of Fanny, which had begun to break plaintively upon ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... uttered that one cry only, as man and horse careened above the pit. She now sat dumbly staring where the two had disappeared. Nothing could she see of Van or his pony. A chill of horror attacked her, there in the blaze of the sun. It was not, even then, so much of herself and Elsa she was thinking—two helpless women, lost in this place of terrible silence; she was smitten by ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... contumely Cold inhumanity, Burning insanity, Into her rest. —Cross her hands humbly As if praying dumbly, Over her breast! Owning her weakness, Her evil behavior, And leaving, with meekness, Her sins to her ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... had dumbly watched the effect of his words, turned about, he found himself confronted with a woman whom he scarcely knew to be his wife, so deadly pale and drawn was her face, so novel and startling were the glance and gesture with which she ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... at times as much as a mile or more behind, dumbly waving Glen to right or left, as he peered through his glass and set the course by the compass and angles of his transit. Anon he signaled the two to wait, and Beth sat down to watch him come, "set up," and ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... peacefully in her little lace crib, covered with violets, and beside her, rigid and white and tearless, stood Rachel. I was almost afraid of the child as I looked at her. She turned her great eyes upon me dumbly, with so exactly Bronson's expression in them that all at once I understood her. I knelt down beside her, and gathering her little tense frame all up in my arms, I began whispering to her. The tears rolled down her cheeks, and soon she was crying hysterically. Bronson ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... keel—keel ze leetle Melisse!" he cried shrilly, snatching up the half-frozen child, "Mon Dieu, she ees not papoose! She ees ceevilize—ceevilize!" and he ran swiftly with her into the cabin, flinging back a torrent of Cree anathema at the dumbly bewildered Maballa. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... there never has been anyone; no one else is thinking of the lakes and hills you see before you. They have no tradition, no names even; they are only pools of water and lumps of earth, some day, perhaps, to be clothed with loves and memories and the comings and goings of men, but now dumbly waiting their Wordsworth or their Acropolis to give them individuality, and a soul. In such country as this there is a rarefied clean sweetness. The air is unbreathed, and the earth untrodden. All things share this childlike loveliness, the grey whispering reeds, the pure blue of the sky, the birches ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... had done, she stared dumbly for a moment; then, leaving the rest of the introductions to her ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter

... it lovers' quarrels, yet I know Though men may bicker with the things they love, They would not make them laughable in all eyes, Not while they loved them; and your wretched dress, A wretched insult on you, dumbly speaks Your story, that this man loves you no more. Your beauty is no beauty to him now: A common chance—right well I know it—palled— For I know men: nor will ye win him back, For the man's love once gone never returns. But here is one who loves you as of old; With more exceeding passion ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... gravitation,—yellow torrent poured From distant mountains by no will of thine, Through thrice a hundred centuries of slow Fallings and liftings of the crust of Earth,— At sight of thee my spirit sinks and fails. Art thou alone the Maker? Is the blind Unconscious power that drew thee dumbly down To cut this gash across the layered globe, The sole creative cause of all I see? Are force and matter all? The rest ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke

... equally impossible to my father and to myself to utter a single word during that short—though, in our then condition of acute mental tension, all too long—drive to the Hard; we sat therefore dumbly side by side, with our hands clasped, until the carriage drew up, when I sprang out, hastily hailed a boatman, and then at once began with feverish haste to drag my belongings off the carriage down into the road. I had still to say good-bye to my father, and I felt that I must ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... arm scarred with the fresh pricks of the useless hypodermic needle, across his burning eyes, his throbbing temples, before he finished out his phrase. Oh, God have mercy! What had he, albeit dumbly, allowed himself to ask of Olive? What right had he, henceforward, to call himself a man, or honourable, or brave, or anything else but an insufferably selfish cad, that he had ever once allowed one such instant of supine ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... herds of game, and warlike Indians, and beyond the range of any vision there are vast mountains white with snow. Gold, too, may be there. It is a country enormous, grandiose, rich, and silent,—a desert waiting dumbly for the strong man's tread." He turned a little and drew another line. "To this side, away, away to the east, here where you and I are sitting, watching, watching, here are the Old Thirteen,—the Thirteen that the English took from the Indians, that the children of the English took ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... seem to be unhappily scarce in the life of this age. Neither understandingly, like poets, nor unconsciously (or, at least, dumbly), like peasants, are we aware of the places in which we live. We make no pilgrimages to holy spots, nor have we wandering students who mark out and acutely set down the distinctions between this people and that. ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... consumption. Irish judges are presented with white gloves with a regularity which may even be annoying to them, and were it not for political trouble they would be unable to look their salaries in the face. The Irish Bar almost weep in chorus at the words "Land Act," and stare, not dumbly, on destitution. These tales are meant for England and are sent there. They will cease to be exported when there is no market for them, and these men will perhaps end by becoming patriotic and social when they learn that they do not really command the Big Battalions. But Ireland ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens

... de Paris and paid a visit to the two ladies, Ralph Touchett and Mr. Bantling having gone out together. The visitor seemed to have wished to give Isabel a proof of his intention to keep the promise made her the evening before; he was both discreet and frank—not even dumbly importunate or remotely intense. He thus left her to judge what a mere good friend he could be. He talked about his travels, about Persia, about Turkey, and when Miss Stackpole asked him whether it would "pay" for her to visit those countries assured her they offered ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... to be in the last stages of wrath and irritation; her eyes flashed. The prince stood dumbly and blindly before her, ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Adams tries dumbly to express in his eyes his determination to see the firm and me through all our troubles and adventures. I wish I could convey a discreet hint to him not to be so blatantly discreet. If there were a Sherlock Holmes about ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... dumbly, looking at his splayed fingers with the vacant stare of an invalid just recovering consciousness. "I want only the coffee; make it strong, please. I really am not hungry. The thought of food, somehow, is sickening. I've worked ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben

... answered Ferguson, and Stone, as the twins looked dumbly at him, confirmed the detective's ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Browning bids the "fooling" stop; for he has touched the point of extreme divergence between the classic spirit and his own. The pallid vision which he repels speaks dumbly of pagan regret for what is past, of pagan hopelessness of the to-come. His religion, as we are again reminded, is one of hope. Let us, he says, do and not dream, look forward and not back; ascend ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... nodded dumbly, although after a moment she said, "Every day I live all my life over again, and my mother's, and all my folks. It has never seemed as though they really died as long as we lived here same as they did. It's like killing them ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... Vegan girl. "We'd better get out of here." He took her arm. Dumbly she went with him. None of the outworlders there tried to stop them. Ramsey looked back at Garr Symm. The Irwadian was shaking his fist. He had finally managed to draw his m.g. gun, but the crowd of outworlders closed between ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance

... of James and the words that this child was uttering stopped Tim Fisher. Puzzled, he nodded dumbly, found a chair, and sat on the ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... removed from the scene. Bim was placed in the corner with his face to the wall. He was aghast; no words can give, at all, any idea of how dumbly aghast he was. What possessed him? What, in an instant of time, had leapt down from the clouds, had sprung up from the Square and seized him? Between his amazed thoughts came little surprised sobs. ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole

... drawer, piling into John's arms the flask of brandy, the homely medicines, the warm garments, such bits of food as she could catch up that were palatable and portable. Pap, with more vulnerable emotions and less resolute nature, was incapable of speech; he could only suffer dumbly. ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... Spurred by contumely, Cold inhumanity, Burning insanity, Into her rest,— Cross her hands humbly, As if praying dumbly, Over her breast! Owning her weakness, Her evil behavior, And leaving, with meekness, Her sins ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... is!' the other drawled; and then, taking advantage of the moment when Julia's attention was engaged elsewhere—she dumbly refused to sit, 'Where is Dunborough?' ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown accretions of fatherly parochial benevolence, ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... to watch within the doors of the Queen's chambers, where, prostrated by anguish and anxiety, one scheme after another for the recovery of her child absorbed her to the exclusion of all other grief. She looked up dumbly as Rizzo and Fabrici drew near her couch—her eyes ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and the gnarled and warted elms and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that time which was as much the property of every Dedlock—while he lasted— as the house and lands. Sir Leicester sits down in an easy-chair, opposing his repose and that of Chesney Wold to the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... a week, and she still fascinates me. She is installed in the annex, and seems calmly satisfied with her surroundings. She brought everything she owns tied up in an oat-sack. I have given her a few of my things, for which she seems dumbly grateful. She seldom talks, and never laughs. But I am teaching her to say "yes" instead of "yaw." She studies me with her limpid blue eyes, and if she is silent she is never sullen. She hasn't the heavy forehead and jaw of the Galician women and she hasn't ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer

... petrified at seeing Peter Storm turn into Pietro Stanislaws. She listened dumbly to Peter's indictment of Caspian; and then, before she found time or words to speak, the little wretch turned to snap at her ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... sat dumbly, holding this sealed document in my hand, he turned to Doctor Ward, with a ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... Dumbly she followed his pace until they reached the hotel. The place was in confusion and the proprietor at his wits' end. In the midst of it, Monte was the only one ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... which had been hers and which they sometimes allowed to be with him after the life sentence had been passed upon him and when he was awaiting removal. He would sit for hours with the little animal in his lap, caressing it dumbly. There was a mute sorrow in the eyes of both man and dog, and they seemed to take comfort in each other's presence. There was no need of any sign between them. They had both loved her, had they ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... cursed coat off!" he dumbly sobbed. "If only I could get rid of these damned laced boots!" Bad words would have been forgivable even had he ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... hidden, disorganised, undiscovered, unsuspected even by themselves, the samurai of Utopia are in this world, the motives that are developed and organised there stir dumbly here and stifle in ten ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... the little toilers to ascertain his weight. Straightaway through his thirty-five pounds of skin and bones there ran a tremor of fear, and he struggled forward to tie a broken thread. I attracted his attention by a touch, and offered him a silver dime. He looked at me dumbly from a face that might have belonged to a man of sixty, so furrowed, tightly drawn, and full of pain it was. He did not reach for the money—he did not know what it was. There were dozens of such children in this particular mill. A physician who was with me said that ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... their customs, and their treatment in sickness and in health. In short, he loved dogs, and, had they met under happier conditions, he would undoubtedly have been on excellent terms with this one within the space of a minute. But, as things were, he abstained from fraternising and continued to goggle dumbly. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... paralyzed with the suddenness of the blow, wondering dumbly why Joan's hand should have inflicted it. The frightened Frenchwoman dared not speak or move. She watched him with that impersonal fear so readily aroused in one of her class by the terrifying spectacle of a strong man in his ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... an effort that was like a physical exercise. He stared at Billie dumbly. Then, recovering speech, he invited her to sit down, and seated ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... note-book and a pencil from his vest-pocket and gave them to Hen, who looked at him dumbly, worked his Adam's apple violently and retreated to his horse, fumbled the mail which was tied in the bottom of a flour sack for safe keeping, sought a sheltered place where he could sit down, remained there a few minutes, and then returned ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... to her as he spoke; meanwhile Von Glauben, with a disconsolate air, had joined Sir Roger de Launay, who, by an enquiring look and anxious uplifting of his eyebrows, dumbly asked what was to be the upshot of this affair,—only to receive a dismal shake ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... yours?'—for the dog which had been following all day pretty obediently, except for a wild dash down to the lagoon to scatter the wild duck, had of a sudden picked up bearings and was running forward, halting, returning, wagging his tail, running forward again, turning, asking dumbly to be understood, in the way all dogs have who invite you ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Beside him group'd his princely peers; And dames aloft, in circling tiers, Wreath'd round their blooming ring. King Francis, where he sate, Raised a finger—yawn'd the gate, And, slow from his repose, A LION goes! Dumbly he gazed around The foe-encircled ground; And, with a lazy gape, He stretch'd his lordly shape, And shook his careless mane, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)

... same hour that the suffering girl knelt thus dumbly before the Lord of all happiness, that man whom she had worshipped in her heart so long, whom she must worship forever, was sitting just as sleeplessly beside his writing-table, separated from her only by two walls, and was thinking ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... gazed at him with a look of such strong interrogation as he was about to follow her into the house that he paused with his foot on the step and eyed her dumbly. ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... sound of his pen, and watched him dumbly. He had apparently dismissed her and her small affairs from his mind. His hand travelled with swift decision over the paper. He was evidently immersed in his own private concerns. He wrote rapidly and ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... the dry bushes. Lizards and other creeping creatures scuttled across their wide tracks. The patient oxen toiled under the yoke, their dappled nostrils widespread, their great dewy eyes strained and dim with weariness. They dumbly wondered why they must labour in the daytime when all night long they had travelled without rest. The glorious sunrise had flamed in crimson and gold behind the eastern ranges full five hours before. They were weary to death, and no dorp or farm was yet in sight. The Cape boys who ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... voice, "allow me if you please, monsieur"—and the sack has disappeared. Blindly and dumbly I stumble on with the roll; and so at length we come into the yard of a little prison; and the divine man bowed under my great sack.... I never thanked him. When I turned, they'd taken him away, and the sack stood accusingly ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... in fact God, why didn't He plainly say there was another life? Why didn't He tell us something about it? Why didn't He turn the tear-stained hope of immortality into the glad knowledge of another life? Why did He go dumbly to his death, and leave the world in darkness and in doubt? Why? Because He was a man and didn't know. I would not destroy the smallest star of human hope, but I deny that we got our idea of immortality from the bible. It existed ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... boy of about fourteen was sitting. He had just done his afternoon's wash, and was resting himself by the fire, enjoying a thumbed football almanac. He had not risen when the visitors entered, and while his grandmother was speaking his lips still moved dumbly, as he went on adding up the football scores. He was a sickly, rather repulsive lad with a ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... remarked in a weak voice, "I'm sick at my stummick." He paused, then added more decidedly: "I'm goin' home. I guess I've stood about enough around here for one day!" And bestowing a last glance upon his friend, who was now sitting dumbly upon the floor in the exact spot where he had stood to fire the dreadful shot, Sam moved ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... hands, looked over his shoulder, and begged to thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character. Then he fell to dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while his little pupil was taken to an open window for air, and was otherwise petted and restored. When she was brought back, his place was empty. 'Jack's gone, Pussy,' Edwin told her. 'I am more than half ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... down the rough waterway and waded into the little pool below the rock and stooped and lifted something from the water. It was the body of the brave old hunter of the hills. With her arms clutched about it the woman began the clamber upward again, shaking her head dumbly, when rude warriors, touched somehow, despite the coarse texture of their being, came wading in to assist her with the ghastly burden. She emerged with it upon the level and laid it gently down upon the grass, but still uttered no word ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo

... He could not see the drift of this, and he was about to whisper to Parpon, when the little man sent him a look, commanding silence, and he fretted on dumbly. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... gaze, and his look was returned dumbly by the woman who had played so strange a part in the late passages of his life. Never a word with her had Law spoken regarding his plans or concerning what he had learned from Pembroke. As to this, Mary Connynge had been afraid to ask, nor dare ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... destroyer of their hopes? As the Spirit of God brooded over the primeval void and brought therefrom order, light, beauty and life, so the spirit of suffering brooded above the torn and saddened heart of womanhood, till at last the angel of awakening appeared, and the heart that had dumbly, patiently endured, stirred to the impulse of defence, and opened to the thought of freedom. The hour had struck, the call had come. The "arrow had been hidden in God's quiver," waiting His time. When His ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm

... when the midnight Is heavy upon the land, And the black waves lying dumbly Along the sand; When the moonless night draws close, And the lights are out in the house; When the fires burn low and red, And the watch is ticking loudly Beside the bed: Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch, Still your heart must wake and watch In the dark room, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... control them, but McCoy's gentle presence seemed to rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the captain, yearned dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London

... had grown curiously darkened, so that we moved as through an obscuring veil; and I dumbly wondered whether this was night (had it been morning or evening when I started for the pond?) or whether I was dying myself. I peered and again made out the sober, stern faces hedging me, but they gave me no answer to my mutely anxious query. Across a great distance we stumbled by the ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... I sank dumbly into my chair and helplessly bowed my head to a ceremony so obsolete in the world from which I had come that I felt as if I was slipping back into the days of the pioneer, when the customs of life were still primitive and dictated by emotion ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... not till then, when she stood, open-mouthed and open-eyed, staring dumbly at this apparition, that she realized how little she had ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield

... power, not only because his expression was incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and clear, but because he saw many new things after which the spirits of others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all. Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din, turmoil, and danger of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front and centre of the fight. His life was not a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... Sir Lucien standing aside to give him precedence. On the second floor was a door painted in Oriental fashion. It possessed neither bell nor knocker, but as one stepped upon the threshold this door opened noiselessly as if dumbly inviting the visitor to enter the square apartment discovered. This apartment was richly furnished in the Arab manner, and lighted by a fine brass lamp swung upon chains from the painted ceiling. The intricate perforations of the lamp were inset with colored glass, and the result ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... no reply. He called again. A faint cry at his back from the trail he had just traversed made him turn. Only a few paces behind him, blinded and staggering, but following like a beaten and wounded animal, Teresa halted, knelt, clasped her hands, and dumbly held them out before her. "Teresa!" he cried again, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... and was lending Ann the money to study stenography. Katie had made a wry face over stenography, which did not have a dream-like or an Ann-like sound—but a very Wayne-like one!—but had entered no protest; at that time she had been too dumbly miserable ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... in anticipation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether. He was brave enough, but personal bravery would not be called for. He sat now staring dumbly at an imaginary series of events abominable and unseemly in every particular to his order of mind. He was so concerned with what the future must hold in store for him that for a time the present quite escaped ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... Devil Dance—the soul, a white-faced child with eyes unnaturally enlarged, fleeing among a rabble of devils—the evil passions. It fled wildly here and there and every way was blocked. The child fell on its knees, screaming dumbly—you could see the despair in the staring eyes, but all was drowned in the thunder of Tibetan drums. ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck

... you see those dusky faces Gazing dumbly to the West— Those dark eyes, so long despairing, ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett

... selfish animal. As Gunner Sobey hauled Hosken's blue boat to shore, poor Pleasant came down the slip-way and rubbed her muzzle against his sleeve, dumbly beseeching him to fetch the horse-boat that she too might cross. He struck her sharply across the nose, and, jumping aboard, thrust off ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why we should ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... to deny it. She nodded dumbly. Besides, she counted on his possession of common sense, though his use of ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... of wood-smoke and coffee roasted in the streets; by the wines, and infusions of the herbs of France; by the churches of France and the beautiful silly chiming of their bells—when not surrounded by all these, they know it, feel it, suffer. But even they do not suffer so dumbly and instinctively, so like a wild animal caged, as that Breton fisherman, caged up in a world of hill and valley—not the world as he had known it. They called his case 'shell-shock'—for the French system would not send a man to convalescence for anything so ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... of the road and walked completely around a cornfield. He counted the stalks in each hill of corn and computed the number of stalks in a whole field. "It should yield twelve hundred bushels of corn, that field," he said to himself dumbly, as though it mattered to him. He pulled a little handful of cornsilk out of the top of an ear of corn and played with it. He tried to fashion himself a yellow moustache. "I'd be quite a fellow with a trim ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson

... But carry hence The lesson she has dumbly taught— That bright young creature kneeling there ...
— Point Lace and Diamonds • George A. Baker, Jr.

... brought Mary Hope down from her horse. All her life she had taken it for granted that lemonade was sacred to the Fourth of July picnics, just as oranges grew for Christmas trees only. She followed Belle dumbly into the house, and once inside she remained dumb with awe at what seemed to her to be the highest ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower

... cloth of his sleeve rough on her bare forearm, feeling the stir and life of his body, the warmth of his breath on her face. She had an impulse to scream wildly to him, as though to make him hear and stop and turn, before he finally disappeared from her sight; and she faced him dumbly. There were no words to tell him—she tried to speak, but before his absent, kind, wandering eyes, a foreknowledge of her own inarticulateness closed her lips. He had not been there, and so he would never know. She stirred, moved away, and rearranged the flowers in a ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... He had seen them dab at their eyes with their handkerchief, and smile the next breath—but this was different. For a minute he didn't quite know what to do; he could hear the blood hammering against his temples while he stood dumbly watching her. He went hesitatingly up, and laid a gloved hand ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower

... but only held out one of the hilts. I took it dumbly. In that instant he could have struck my head from ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson

... voice rose almost to a scream as he repeated the word. He rose and sat down again. "Then how did you—why did you——" He stopped, fighting for words, and, unable to frame them, clutched the air with his hands. A moment he mouthed dumbly, then "Tell me!" he gasped. "Speak, man, speak! How was it? Cannot you see—that ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... shouted at Mikah as he ran at Narsisi who had been dumbly watching the performance and mulling over Mikah's words. Slow as he appeared, there was nothing wrong with his reflexes and his shield snapped up and took Jason's blow while his club spun over neatly and rapped Jason on the back of the ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... patience. We willed that this wracking tumult should cease; we willed it with all the force that was in us. Then, as this proved vain, we too humped our spiritual backs, cowled our souls with patience, and waited dumbly for the force of the storm to spend itself. Our faculties were quite as effectually drowned out by the unceasing roar and crash of the waters as our bodily comfort would have been had we lacked the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... him to give him George's dying message, and to thank him on her own account for all that he had done to help her journey. The letter was phrased as Nelly could not help phrasing anything she wrote. Cicely, to whom Nelly dumbly shewed it, thought it 'sweet.' But on Farrel's morbid state, it struck like ice, and he had the greatest difficulty in writing a letter of sympathy, such as any common friend must send her, in return. Every word seemed to him ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the work of the men of his party, elegant and brilliant as it often is, is the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of their compatriots. For them, as it is for every Russian musician, Russia was without their windows, appealing dumbly for expression of its wild, ungoverned energy, its misery, its rich and childish laughter, its deep, great Christianity. It wanted a music that would have the accents of its rude, large-hearted speech, and that would, like its speech, express ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... heavy voice of Carpy and shrank back. The doctor, McAlpin behind him dumbly staring, confronted Laramie at the door: "What are you doin' here, Jim?" ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... aching to tell her that his great ambition was to be her Warrior Bold, and ride out to do doughty deeds for her sweet sake; that she was his Love so young and fair, of whom he had been singing, with eyes so blue and heart so true; but instead, he walked dumbly by her side, keeping carefully a yard away from her, and answering her laborious attempts at conversation with only a word. For Gavin was one of the inarticulate poets of earth, a mute, inglorious Lovelace, ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith

... as helplessly as a frightened child. "The air!" he groaned. "It is hot!" and then he held out his hand to the princess, and showed her a flake of soot on it, and he dumbly pointed to others ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben

... his enemy dumbly. Colonel Harrington was a power in Pleasantville, his will and his ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman

... her at all? Or was she so different in that wet, muddied blouse, hair streaming, and face scratched—she looked down at her grimy little hands and wondered dumbly what her ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley

... courses. Most of those present had known Fillmore Nicholas as an impecunious young man who could make a tweed suit last longer than one would have believed possible; they had called him "Fill" and helped him in more than usually lean times with small loans: but to-night they had eyed the waistcoat dumbly and shrank back abashed. ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... strange perfume, blend of logwood flower, pimento, and aromatic cedars. He lost himself in unprofitable speculations born of that singular fragrance. He was in no mood for conversation, nor was Pitt, who stood dumbly at his side, and who was afflicted mainly at the moment by the thought that he was at last about to be separated from this man with whom he had stood shoulder to shoulder throughout all these troublous months, and whom he had come to love and depend ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... your hand the pages turned, I watched you, dumbly contemplating— O how exceedingly I yearned To ask the girl ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... of the other girls. Beth took an observation of the new boys and decided that the lame one was not 'dreadful', but gentle and feeble, and she would be kind to him on that account. Amy found Grace a well-mannered, merry, little person, and after staring dumbly at one another for a few minutes, they suddenly became very ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... beside him, telling what he knew, Fenwick all the time dumbly vexed that this good-looking, prosperous fellow, this Academician in his new fur coat, breathing success and commissions, should know more of his best friend's doings ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... families in our commune have relatives residing in the little hamlets between Cregy and Monthyon, and have been out to help them re-install themselves. Very little in the way of details of the battle seems to be known. Trees and houses dumbly tell their own tales. The roads are terribly cut up, but road builders are already at work. Huge trees have been broken off like twigs, but even there men are at work, uprooting them and cutting the wood into lengths and ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich

... Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... him to point to his predecessor's short tenure of office and plead the alternative of carrying out Mrs. Trevor's theory of education or of resigning his position in favour of some sycophant even more time-serving? But he had kept silent.... Doggie stopped short and looked at Phineas with eyes dumbly questioning and quivering lips. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... jumped at the thunderous noise and reached for his gun. He dropped his hand sheepishly when he realized it was only a sneeze—though a gargantuan one. Brion came up, sniffling, huddling down into his coat. "I'm going out before I catch pneumonia," he said. The guard saluted dumbly, and after checking his proximity detector screens he slipped out and the heavy portal thudded shut behind him. The street was still warm from the heat of the day and he sighed happily and opened ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... eye began to roll—to Cis's face, seeing the truth written there, and the story of her long hours of suffering; to the countenance of the priest, to ask, dumbly, if any living man had ever heard anything more outrageous than this; then, "By the Great Horn Spoon!" he breathed, and again stomped one foot, like ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... was a 30-40 bullet—his own! He stared dumbly at the thing on the ground. Then, automatically, he fired again, taking ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx

... years matured, And the blows were three That time ensured On her, which she dumbly endured; And one on ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy

... that this was Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, the wife who had divorced him for systematic and ingrowing fiendishness on the ground that he had repeatedly outraged her feelings by wearing a white waistcoat with a dinner-jacket. She continued to look at him dumbly, and then uttered a sort of strangled, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its phantoms,—and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and dumbly—till, perhaps, the light come again. It is difficult to offer comfort to such a one. Comfort is cheap, and we know nothing. When life holds nothing for our love and delight, it is difficult to explain why ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... she had made the attempt. She flushed and lifted her head, for there was no lack of pride or spirit in her softness. Yet by and by she could not help looking at him across the table with another soft appeal in her sweet eyes which plead dumbly for old times' sake. And after breakfast was over she tried again, knowing that this would be the last opportunity, and yearning with all her loving heart to win back some of the old friendliness that she still prized as a precious thing, which she could not give up for a mere touch ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks

... towards which the brows rose piteously. What a deep solemn grief in the eyes! They looked blankly at the object before them, but through it, as it were, and into the grief beyond. In moments of pain, have you not looked at some indifferent object so? It mingles dumbly with your grief, and remains afterwards connected with it in your mind. It may be some indifferent thing—a book which you were reading at the time when you received her farewell letter (how well you remember the paragraph ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and anguished eyes, Frederik Grimm looked dumbly at his tormentor. Even in his agony, he felt, subconsciously, far down in his atrophied soul, that the doctor's forecast as to the duration of his remorse's torture was ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... I'll really die before he is liberated," he was saying dumbly to himself. "I wonder if I will. There's no sign of it now. I'm strong and well enough to live for years. Suppose he is freed inside of a month or two, what then? By Heaven, I'd be losing the dearest hope of my whole life. My last ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... leetle Melisse!" he cried shrilly, snatching up the half-frozen child, "Mon Dieu, she ees not papoose! She ees ceevilize—ceevilize!" and he ran swiftly with her into the cabin, flinging back a torrent of Cree anathema at the dumbly bewildered Maballa. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... failed less of its effect outside the city than it did within; but there again it depended upon the hearer. When the mellow tones floated above the heath where the gipsies camped, only one, perchance, might listen, lifting her bright eyes with pleasure and longing in them, dumbly, as a child might, yet showing for a moment some glimmering promise of a soul. But to many in the village close at hand the chime brought comfort. It seemed to assure the sick, counting the slow hours, that they were not forsaken, and helped them to bear their pain with patience; ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... price of our bread— Up goes the cost of our caking! People must ever be fed; Bakers must ever be baking. So, though our nerves may be quaking, Dumbly, in arrant despair, Pay we the crowd that is taking All that ...
— Something Else Again • Franklin P. Adams

... offense of inconsiderate and self- seeking interruptions. She broke into the speech of others with crude abandon. The itch to lead and preempt the conversation became uncontrollable. Finer natures thrown with her could but tolerate her "naive" discourtesy, while dependents had to dumbly endure. Mrs. Orr but stands as a type illustrating far too many mortally wearisome, social pretenders, prominent only through the tireless ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... say another word. For seconds they became one of the speechless couples, standing dumbly in the great dingy ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway

... free and knelt on one knee upon the bench, with both hands outstretched against him; and he, not grasping the psychological points of the moment, sat down dumbly beside her, instead of mastering her physically, or mentally on the spot as ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... not know what to do. He had never seen a woman cry so before.... Did girls always act this way when they became engaged? Was it the usual thing, or was something wrong with Ruth? He stood by, dumbly waiting, unhappy when he knew he should be happy; troubled when he knew there should be no cloud in his sky; vaguely apprehensive when he knew he should be looking into the future with eyes confident of finding only ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... her the valley of distress and humiliation through which this man had been passing. His bitter look, at once of challenge and renunciation, set her trembling; she felt herself all weakness; and suddenly the woman in her—dumbly, unguessed—held out ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not meditate an attempt on his weapon, for he had, a few minutes before, told him a story about a prisoner who escaped in exactly that way. Stoliker was suspicious of the good intentions of the man he had in charge; he was altogether too polite and good-natured; and, besides, the constable dumbly felt that the prisoner was a ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr

... Jud stared dumbly at the speaker as though almost stunned. Perhaps he might have said something under the spur of such strange emotions as were chasing through his brain, but just then Bobolink chanced to sneer. The sound acted on Jud like magic, for he drew himself up, turned to ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren

... without a word she began to ascend the stairs. Gray followed, Sir Lucien standing aside to give him precedence. On the second floor was a door painted in Oriental fashion. It possessed neither bell nor knocker, but as one stepped upon the threshold this door opened noiselessly as if dumbly inviting the visitor to enter the square apartment discovered. This apartment was richly furnished in the Arab manner, and lighted by a fine brass lamp swung upon chains from the painted ceiling. The intricate perforations ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer

... blossoms, for, in the cottage, the dreaded small-pox had once raged. 'It seemed,' says Jefferies, 'to quite spoil the violet bank. There is something in disease so destructive; as it were, to flowers.' And as the violets shared the scourge, so the creatures shared the curse. And as they stared dumbly into the eyes of the Son of God they seemed to half understand that their redemption was drawing nigh. 'In Nature herself,' as Longfellow says, 'there is a waiting and hoping, a looking and yearning, after an unknown something. Yes, when above there, on the mountain, ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... is all a dream. You cannot believe that it is the sleeping room of your own sister that has been thus invaded and desecrated. At last from one of the older and more trusted servants you hear the truth, and while he speaks, you listen dumbly, wonderingly." ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... watching the bud of Dorothy's childhood swell to the slim charms of girlhood, held his own counsel and worshipped her dumbly. Perhaps he remembered the gulf that had separated his father's log cabin from her uncle's manor house in the old Virginia days, but of these things ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... a stupendous power, not only because his expression was incomparably lucid, or even because his sight was exquisitely keen and clear, but because he saw many new things after which the spirits of others were unconsciously groping and dumbly yearning. Nor was this all. Fontenelle was both brilliant and far-sighted, but he was cold, and one of those who love ease and a safe hearth, and carefully shun the din, turmoil, and danger of the great battle. Voltaire was ever in the front and centre ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... end of Brit's matrimonial affairs, he heard from the children once in a year, perhaps, after they were old enough to write. He did not send them money, because he seemed never to have any money to send, and because they did not ask for any. Dumbly he sensed, as their handwriting and their spelling improved, that his children were growing up. But when he thought of them they seemed remote, prattling youngsters whom Minnie was for ever worrying over and who seemed to have been always under the heels of his ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to me as if it were prevented, by laws to which I was not amenable, from fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could invisibly, dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at the learned gentleman's elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat, it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few seconds ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens

... old china that seemed to have been picked up from all parts of the world,—most of it was undoubtedly valuable. In one dark corner stood an ancient harp; then there was the spinning-wheel,—itself a curiosity fit for a museum,—testifying dumbly of the mistress of all these surroundings, and on the floor there was something else,—something that both the young men were strongly inclined to take possession of. It was only a bunch of tiny meadow daisies, fastened together with a bit of blue silk. It had fallen,—they ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth. What strikes one with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. It is like a visitation, like a curse from Heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents: a true desert harbouring no Spirit either of the East ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... panting and dumbly resisting the sentries up beside the first Jews. They were citizens who dared not rejoice aloud. They followed the young Roman with brightened eyes, saying each ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... show you," Professor Lightning said. He stood up and went to the flap of the tent. "Come with me," he said, and Charley got up, dumbly, and followed him out ...
— Charley de Milo • Laurence Mark Janifer AKA Larry M. Harris

... repeated Thornton dumbly. "Aeta isn't within five minutes of crossing. Both clocks can't ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... Sorry of heart and sore of foot, weary men were we. The short-lived sun had a leaden glare and the darkness came too soon, And stationed there with a solemn stare was the pinched, anaemic moon. Silence and silvern solitude till it made you dumbly shrink, And you thought to hear with an outward ear the things you thought ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... the pleasant arc of sky The great stone box is cruelly displayed. The street becomes more dreary from its shade, And vagrant breezes touch its walls and die. Here sullen convicts in their chains might lie, Or slaves toil dumbly at some dreary trade. How worse than folly is their labor made Who cleft the rocks that this ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer

... his fists till they trembled; his thumbs were again closed under his fingers. Like a picture on a cloth before him he still saw Helena's face, white, rounded, in feature quite mute and expressionless, just made terrible by the heavy eyes, pleading dumbly. He thought of her going on and on, still at the carriage window looking out; all through the night rushing west and west to the land of Isolde. Things began to haunt Siegmund like a delirium. He knew not where he was hurrying. Always in front of him, as on a cloth, was the face of Helena, ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... gained the top of the hill I saw Dan climbing upwards from the old peat track, and I followed dumbly as he led me into an old quarry, long since disused except by the sheep on the warm summer days, and there we lay almost exhausted, content just to know that the storm rushed over our pitiful retreat, and it seems droll to me ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... her little lace crib, covered with violets, and beside her, rigid and white and tearless, stood Rachel. I was almost afraid of the child as I looked at her. She turned her great eyes upon me dumbly, with so exactly Bronson's expression in them that all at once I understood her. I knelt down beside her, and gathering her little tense frame all up in my arms, I began whispering to her. The tears rolled ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell

... extricating, and extorting from the circumambient chaos of muddy babble, rumor and mendacity, some not inconceivable human and divine Image of them, more and more clear, complete and credible for mankind (poor mankind dumbly looking up to him for guidance, as to what it shall think of God and of Men in this Scene of Things),—I calculate, we should by this time have had a different Friedrich of it; O Heavens, a different world of it, in ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... a pencil from his vest-pocket and gave them to Hen, who looked at him dumbly, worked his Adam's apple violently and retreated to his horse, fumbled the mail which was tied in the bottom of a flour sack for safe keeping, sought a sheltered place where he could sit down, remained there a few minutes, and then returned to his horse He beckoned ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... below but the pale glimmer of the lamp that showed the brother who had made him desolate. Like a blind man who believes there is a sun, yet cannot see it, he shook his head, let his arms drop nervelessly upon his knees, and sat there dumbly asking that question which many a soul whose faith is firmer fixed than his has asked in hours less dark than this,—"Where is God?" I saw the tide had turned, and strenuously tried to keep this rudderless life-boat from slipping ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... 'Silence—silence!' now is aye your soundless voice, Lifted in an awful patience o'er the world's uproarious noise; O'er its jarrings and its greetings—o'er its loving and its hate— Silence! Bare thy brows all dumbly to the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various

... her sad companion agreed, shaking his head. "Nobody at all, Julia. Nobody at all." Rousing himself, he went back for the golf tools, and with a lingering gentleness set them in a corner. Then, dumbly, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... His sister was making a speech. She didn't stop when the car stopped, nor when Mr. Starkweather climbed down stiffly, and held open the door for her, nor even when they had reached the portico of the big brick house. He told himself, dumbly, that if the world would ever listen to Mirabelle, it would certainly reform. Not necessarily in ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... was true. She clings to her mistress, endeavouring to calm her. "What, dear heart, have you so long been concealing from me? Not one tear did you shed at parting from father and mother. Hardly a word of farewell did you speak to those remaining behind. Coldly and dumbly you left the land of home; pale and silent you have been on the voyage, taking no food, taking no sleep, deeply troubled, rigid and wretched,—how am I to endure to see you thus, to be nothing to you, to stand before you as a stranger? Oh, tell ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... Creeds and formularies that bind the visible, the legal, church. They do not even think much about them. Forgive me if I speak plainly! They are not grieving about the old. Their soul—those of them, I mean that have the gift of religion—is travailing—dumbly travailing—with the new. Slowly, irresistibly, they are evolving for themselves new forms, new creeds, whether they know it or not. You—the traditional party—you, the bishops and the orthodox majority—can help ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative at the gate of Alma Mater?" But alas! he had no choice: Mr. Tatler, whose career, he says himself, had been successful, passed peacefully away, and has ever since dumbly implored "the bringing home of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... protested against these austerities and decisions. It told him dumbly that she did want, very much, to please him; but that she ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... off her throat with the back of her hand, dumbly, mechanically thinking: "What have I done to be treated like this? What HAVE I done?" No answer came. And such rage against men flared up that she just stood there, twisting her garden-gloves in her hands, and biting the lips he would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... room, so heavy with its odor of mildew, her window closed against the long, sweetly warm days, hunched dumbly on the cot-edge and staring into the stripe and vine, stripe and vine of the wall-paper design, or lie back when the ache along her spine began to set in. There were occasional ventures to a corner bake-shop for raisin rolls and to the ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... blood and sympathy the spirit of secession—bearer now of the Stars and Stripes! How his heart thumped, and how his head reeled when he caught the staff and looked dumbly up to the folds; and in spite of all his self-control, the tears came, as they came again and ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... at each other dumbly—the actor paralysed by terror, the host wearing the smile of a lunatic. And then the "lunatic" slowly peeled court-plaster from his teeth, and removed features, and lifted ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... thinking of the lakes and hills you see before you. They have no tradition, no names even; they are only pools of water and lumps of earth, some day, perhaps, to be clothed with loves and memories and the comings and goings of men, but now dumbly waiting their Wordsworth or their Acropolis to give them individuality, and a soul. In such country as this there is a rarefied clean sweetness. The air is unbreathed, and the earth untrodden. All things share this childlike loveliness, the grey whispering reeds, the pure blue of the sky, the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... that they must take chances with through the long watches of the night, while the thirst grew in the beasts' parched throats, they foresaw what would in all probability happen; they thought of their women, of all that most strongly bound them to life, and they sat and waited dumbly. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... that, Dorothy. I would have killed him had we met. Do you understand? I would have killed the man you expect to marry. Have you thought of that?" She sank back in the seat and looked at him dumbly, horror in her face. "That is one reason why I laughed at his ridiculous challenge. How could I hope to claim the love of the woman whose affianced husband I had slain? I can win you with him alive, but I would have built an insurmountable barrier between us had he died by ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... last. He had blundered clumsily, and he knew it. The colour drained from Eileen's face and she stood rigid as a statue for a moment. Then slowly she swayed forward. He stretched out his arms to prevent her from falling. She waved him aside dumbly and tottered to a couch. His directness had been more merciful than he had thought. She was stunned, dazed by her calamity. Her very silence frightened the man. She sat bolt upright, her hand resting limply in her lap and her ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved, the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the experiment—and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... Breede. "No good. Better lie down. She says she's got it all reasoned out, don't I tell you?" He put a throttling hand over the anguished voice, and looked dumbly at Bean. He noted the evil sneer and traced it to the cuffs. Slowly he hung up the receiver and took one of the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... his head, dumbly. In his eyes was an agony of pain. And suddenly all those inexplicable things in his face were made clear to Fanny. She placed the little Mizzi in the nurse's arms again. "Then we'll go, dear. They won't be a minute over your trunks, I'm sure. Just ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... what I am dumbly groping for—some way of thinking about the War that will make it seem (to future ages) a purification for humanity rather than a mere blackness of stinking cinders and tortured flesh and men shot to ribbons in marshes of blood ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... "stepped in" and was lending Ann the money to study stenography. Katie had made a wry face over stenography, which did not have a dream-like or an Ann-like sound—but a very Wayne-like one!—but had entered no protest; at that time she had been too dumbly miserable to enter ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... David realize how terribly his announcement of Tavish's death must have struck into the soul of Father Roland. For a few seconds the Missioner did not move. He was wide awake, he had heard, and yet he looked at David dumbly, his two hands gripping his blanket. When he did move, it was to turn his face slowly toward the end of the cabin where the thing was hanging, with only the wall between. Then, still slowly, he rose ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... circled, fixed upon him with a meek, sorrowful look, spoke dumbly the troublous tale of her mind. In her subdued mood the likeness to Madeleine was more obtrusive than it had ever yet been. He contemplated her with melancholy, and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... Jack scarcely took in the fact that anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... you, perchance, who ache to strain us Dumbly to the dim transfigured breast, Or with tragic gesture would detain us From ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton

... transparent, and that the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own; or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away perforce from a spirit as pure ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... seat herself on the living green, amid roses and violets, or on the mossy bank studded with cresses or cowslips, and laved by the crystal stream? May she never view the silver fish as he leaps up, and "dumbly speaks the praise of God?" May she never wander abroad for the sake of wandering, or ride for the sake of riding; or gaze on the blue ethereal by day, or the star-spangled ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott

... rather pleased at all the luggage having turned up without any effort on your part, pleased at being freed from the importunities of out-of-work boys, and dumbly acquiesce, so that Lao San remains until you have the time or inclination to engage a really good boy; but as you seldom have the time, and never the inclination, he ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... bodies; but we were much more miserable than under the sweltering heat of Andersonville, as we lay almost naked upon our bed of pine leaves, shivering in the raw, rasping air, and looked out over acres of wretches lying dumbly on the sodden sand, receiving the benumbing drench of the sullen skies without a groan ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... on "Hail Columbia," And get to "heav'n-born band," And there I strike an up-grade With neither steam nor sand; "Star Spangled Banner" downs me Right in my wildest screaming, I start all right, but dumbly come To voiceless ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... ministered dumbly to the misery of the bereaved ones, but made no effort to follow or frustrate the abductors. The town seemed as helpless as the marshal, not willingly or wittingly, but because it had so long known him as leader that ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... use us—dolls, beasts of burden, and you expect us to bear it forever dumbly; but I won't! I shall cry out till I die. And now you say it almost out loud, "Go and breed for the empire." War brides! Pah! [Minna gasps, beginning to be terrified. Hoffman rages. Mother gazes with ...
— War Brides: A Play in One Act • Marion Craig Wentworth

... are also a lot of fine fellows—and fine women. They are men and women, if I understand it, who have sloughed off the conventions, that are conventions simply for convention's sake, and who are reaching out towards the realities. Most of them haven't an idea what those are, but dumbly they know. Tommy knows, for instance, who is a good chum and who isn't; that is, he knows that sincerity and unselfishness and pluck are realities. He doesn't care a damn if a chap drinks and swears and commits what the Statute-Book and the Prayer-Book ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable

... the earth, All the earth's wild creatures fly thee, Everywhere thou marrest mirth. Dumbly they defy thee. There is ...
— Poems • Alice Meynell

... impossible to persuade her to return to the house, he only succeeded after promising to keep within sight. She was afraid of one thing or another at home, but when he urged her to tell him the reason, she would look dumbly ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... impossible to my father and to myself to utter a single word during that short—though, in our then condition of acute mental tension, all too long—drive to the Hard; we sat therefore dumbly side by side, with our hands clasped, until the carriage drew up, when I sprang out, hastily hailed a boatman, and then at once began with feverish haste to drag my belongings off the carriage down into the road. I had still to say good-bye to my father, ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... stared at him dumbly. She began to realize that the knightly spirit of those gallant, long dead gentlemen was indeed descended upon the last of their house, that he burnt with the same pure fire which had long ago lighted ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... down at him dumbly. For a few seconds neither of them stirred; then Ricardo lowered his glance, and, opening his fingers, let the whole pack fall on the table. Schomberg sat down. He sat down because of the faintness in his legs, and for no other reason. His mouth was dry. Having sat down, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... her dumbly, hopelessly; then his arm twitched and he relieved the wrist from the weight of his head, sitting upright, his eyes still ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... to move. He saw Freeman and McGuire streaking wildly down the street with police in keen pursuit. Hollis stood staring dumbly inside the bank door. Alan saw Kovak come running ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg









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