"Tense" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beside him, facing the room, with body motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... There was a tense silence for a minute. Through all the bewildering and overwhelming thoughts that were crashing through Broussard's brain, but one thing was clear and unshakable, the deathless loyalty that a ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... their eyes followed his every motion. His motions grew less and less rapid; he moved toward them, and then suddenly retreated, and through all these evolutions the three men's faces became more and more tense, and finally the muscles of their faces relaxed, their eyes stared with a blank expression, and the motions ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... scampering halfway across the pasture before he dared halt from the terror behind. And then, at last, another impulse which always sent the child stealing back into the woods again, shy, alert, tense as a watching fox, to find out what the fearful thing was that could make such a ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... reserve power, fellows!" he called in a low, tense voice. "Make every stroke count! Full muscle! Never mind your backs! One, two, ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock
... called in the front room, and the woman put on her cap and ran in; Jane stood where she left her. She hardly knew what moved her to-night; she saw her own body walking about, tense and foreign, as though some possession had it; she had felt a new, strange kind of strength all day, after she had her cry out. She looked up at the picture again, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to it, inch by inch, or whether it, seeing him about to make good his escape, had crept up on him, he could not say. He only knew that it was there, within arm's-length, waiting, tense, prepared, and somehow deadly in ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... six Joseph Rouletabille was again brought in. It is impossible for me to picture the tense excitement which appeared on every face, as he made his way to the bar. Darzac rose ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... of extorting the truth, Vaniman was conscious of a feeling of comradeship with the three rapscallions at that moment. They were merely seeking loot. He was seeking the re-establishment of his honor and his love. He waited in the tense silence, straining every nerve to hear. No sound came to him. He wondered whether Britt, cowed, was ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... The tense lines about the girl's mouth disappeared slowly as she passed a small brown hand across her forehead and replaced a ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... bequests came 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 and Rosamond ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualised, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as 'poor Jemmie,' was at any time ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... conquest of Cortes, in his triumphant march from Vera Cruz to the capital. The plan of the battle of Cerro Gordo was so fully carried out in action that the official report is hardly more than the general orders translated from the future tense to the past. The story of Chapultepec has the same element of the marvelous in it. On one day the general commanded apparent impossibilities in the closest detail, and the next day reported that they had been accomplished. These successes were not cheaply attained. The Mexicans, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... glance was a tense eager expression, yet upon his face was written a mystery she could ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... wasn't frightened, but he had never met an opponent like this. A chill raced up the back of his legs and spread over his stomach and chest. His mouth was dry and his muscles quivered with tense anticipation. But his concentration never wavered. His hard blue eyes never left George's, searching with microscopic intentness for the faintest sign of the ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... closed, most of the houses were shuttered; all this was too remarkable not to have been arranged. Virginia and I looked at one another; but she watched me like a cat, keeping guard over every movement of mine. One hand pressed her bosom, the other was stretched downwards—a straight, tense line from ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Now I knew our current fate, and felt as if I heard again the gas gong going continuously. I had the feeling in April, unknown to any snail on the thorn, that the park was deafening with the clangour of pallid, tense, and contending lunatics. The Serpentine had receded from this tumult. Its tranquil shimmering was now fatuous and unbelievable. It was but half seen; its glittering was a distant grimacing and mockery at my troubled human intelligence. It was nothing ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... lifting an arm, took the blow on his elbow-joint and writhed, cursing; but while I laughed 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 ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... faces of women and bright eager faces of little children who were holding out their hands trustfully to the future. There seemed to be a never-ending procession—faces that were apathetic from repeated disappointments, faces that scowled threateningly, brave faces tense with determination and sad faces on which was written the story of struggle hidden within many a lonely wind-buffeted shack on the great bosom of ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there was no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken. Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of them there ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the window, alert and tense. He flew to the desk, found the envelope, steamed it open at the kettle, extracted the sealed envelope and Colonel Hare's note. He smiled as he read the letter and changed his plans completely. He would not play messenger; he would ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... further sound, I fancied I could hear the rustling of a large body forcing its way through the bush. "The man-eater," I thought to myself; "surely to-night my luck will change and I shall bag one of the brutes." Profound silence again succeeded; I sat on my eyrie like a statue, every nerve tense with excitement. Very soon, however, all doubt as to the presence of the lion was dispelled. A deep long-drawn sigh—sure sign of hunger—came up from the bushes, and the rustling commenced again as he cautiously ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping. Her whole being was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought. Their short exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing. She had guessed a faint resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a dawning ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... and severe, seems to them worthy to be continued yonder and without end. This day leading a better, itself good not leading alone,—this presentiment,—this solid increment of hard-won power,—of what other stuff should our eternity be woven? In wisdom first appears the present tense, an hour which is not mere transition, but something for itself. There are men who live—to live. He who finds our destiny given beforehand in the nature of things has the leisure of God: he has not only all the time that is, but spaces beyond, so that he will not be hurried by the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... implicated edged away from them on either side as far as possible, until they crouched, isolated, crestfallen, and self- condemned by their guilty countenances, a target for all eyes. At length Sekosini's story came to an end, and for a few tense moments a profound silence ensued. There was not an individual present who did not realise the vital importance to the entire nation of the issues that had been raised by the witch doctor's confession, and the manner ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... praeter perfect tense of the verb affo, affis, affui, affere," gabbled off Tom with such confidence, that though Ethel gave an indignant jump, Richard was almost startled into letting it pass, and disbelieving himself. He remonstrated in a somewhat hesitating voice. "Did you find that in the dictionary?" said ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... emotion in any garment when it was so beautiful in 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... good," he said. "And that's the truth, Valerie." A dark flush stained his face and he turned it away, sitting there in silence, his tense clasp tightening on the arms of the chair. Then he said, still ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... moment and gasped as if for breath; his soup lay neglected before him, his elbows were on the table, and his two hands locked together in a grip so tense that the knuckles shone white in the light that came streaming in through the scuttles in the ship's side, his eyes were glassy and staring into vacancy with an intensity of gaze which plainly showed that the whole dreadful scene was again unfolding itself before his ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... too well known or too insignificant to justify comment. The notes are further reenforced by an Idiomatic Commentary, to be studied in connection with the text. By frequent reviews and by oral drill in translating the idioms from either language to the other, with changes of person, tense, etc., wherever possible, the Commentary should enable the student to attain to a real mastery of the idioms ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... 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 meet ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust- shells which you find sticking ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of my equestrian career in France, I never came off. I rode along in front of my section, balancing on this "Ship of the Desert" of mine, past all the same landmarks, cracked houses, windmills, estaminets, etc. I experienced innumerable tense moments when my horse—as frequently happened—took me for a bit of a circular tour in an adjacent field, so as to avoid some colossal motor lorry with one headlight of about a million candle-power, which would suddenly roar its way down our single narrow road. At ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather
... names over the gateway he entered the yard, and asked at the office if Solomon Chickerel was engaged on the premises. The clerk was going to be very attentive, but finding the visitor had come only to speak to a workman, his tense attitude slackened a little, and he merely signified the foot of a Flemish ladder on the other side of the yard, saying, 'You will find him, sir, up ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow and blinked out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the train there and I heard a woman's low tones, a southern voice, rich and full. Then quiet again. Every nerve was tense: time passed, perhaps ten minutes, possibly half an hour. Then, without the slightest warning, as the train rounded a curve, a heavy body was thrown into my berth. The incident, trivial as it seemed, was startling ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... strange gloom and a stranger fear; and so, because the greatest of all tragedies had come into their little world, Cummins' people were speechless in their grief and their waiting for the final word. And when the word came to them at last, and passed from lip to lip, and from one grim, tense face to another, the doors closed again, and the lights went out one by one, until there remained only the yellow eye of the factor's office and the faint glow from the little cabin in which John Cummins knelt ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... sigh of relief and start to say something, a comrade would be sure to utter a sudden "Hark!" and instantly the experimenter was rigid and listening again. So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, and we slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name—for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. It was a sleep seething and teeming with a weird and distressful confusion of shreds and fag-ends ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pupils, every sense tense with this effort to hear, the need to breathe, the impossibility of seeing, he advanced slowly, a pistol in one hand, touching the wall with the other to guide himself. He walked thus for fifteen minutes. A few drops of ice-cold water fell through ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the troubles of to-morrow. This is exceedingly foolish. There is always some pleasure at hand; seize it, and at no time will you be without pleasure. You cannot change the past, but your spirit at this moment will in some measure shape your future. Live life, therefore, in the present tense; do not miss the joys ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... tiptoes, encased himself in his mitt and turned, tense and alert. He had gone through his first ordeal triumphantly. No chances had come to him in the field, but at bat he had accidently succeeded in being hit, and though he had struck out the next time he had hit a foul and knew the jubilant ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... moved 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 heap of gray ashes in the ground underneath with a ring of half-burnt chips ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his stay in Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange to say, while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past tense, Joanne, so much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate, the thing was worth trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We found the place a little way from Flers, a church and a few houses, called distinctively ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... theory which I adduced in my notes to Childe Rowland. Another point of interest in English folk-narrative is the repetition of verbs of motion, "So he went along and went along and went along." Still more curious is a frequent change of tense from the English present to the past. "So he gets up and went along." All this helps to give the colloquial and familiar air to the English fairy-tale not to mention the dialectal and archaic words and phrases ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... the daughter of a landowner and general, a young and pretty girl, dreaming day and night of being married, was sitting in her room, gazing with exhausted, half-closed eyes into the looking-glass. She was pale, tense, and ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... a splendour of silence, felt, Seen, and heard of the spirit within the sense. Soft through the frondage the shades of the sunbeams melt, Sharp through the foliage the shafts of them, keen and dense, Cleave, as discharged from the string of the God's bow, tense As a war-steed's girth, and bright as a warrior's belt. Ah, why should an hour that is heaven for an ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the brake and turned about for the next order, he cast his glance out upon the bay, and there, not a hundred and fifty yards away, her spotless sails tense, her cordage humming, her immaculate flanks slipping easily through the waves, the water hissing and churning under her forefoot, clean, gleaming, dainty, and aristocratic, the Ridgeways' yacht "Petrel" passed like a thing of life. Wilbur saw Nat Ridgeway himself at ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... they—at least than Mr. Deacon. He made little conjugal jokes in the presence of Lulu who, now completely unnerved by the habit, suspected them where they did not exist, feared lurking entendre in the most innocent comments, and became more tense ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... changing tones mingled with the blue wreaths that ascended from the sanctuary in a fragrant cloud, lingering over the congregation. The celebrant offered the bread and wine to Our Father in Heaven. And all this took time; the children were tired by their tense concentration; their prayers had all been said two and three times over; and they were now vacantly waiting and longing, looking at their clothes, at the stained-glass windows in the choir or St. Anne in her crimson cloak, or counting the ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... tense describes a past action or state in progress; the Past Definite narrates an event. Ex.: I met (past def.)] Charles, who wore (imp.) a black hat: Encontre a Carlos quien llevaba ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... this strange contempt for what his eyes could see, this distaste for words, this unbelief in the importance of things and men? He tried to regain possession of himself, his old self which had things to do, words to speak as well as to hear. But it was too difficult. He was seduced away by the tense feeling of existence far superior to the mere consciousness of life, and which in its immensity of contradictions, delight, dread, exultation and despair could not be faced and yet was not to be evaded. There was no peace in it. But who wanted peace? Surrender was better, the dreadful ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... had given over all hopes of yours. By-the-by, my 'grata superveniet' should be in the present tense; for I perceive it looks now as if it applied to this present scrawl reaching you, whereas it is to the receipt of thy Kilkenny epistle that I have ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... mulatto had the best of it; his lithe dark limbs coiled about his adversary with paralyzing force: but soon the greater weight of the English youth began to tell; his young, well-knit figure straightened and grew tense. ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... If the persons spoken of were eternally elected, then they were also eternally called, and eternally justified, and eternally glorified. They would thus be justified before they sinned, and glorified before they had a being. The verbs are all in the aorist tense, and what is true of one verb is true of all the others. An interpretation burdened with such consequences cannot ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... when first that voice I heard, Despite my close and tense endeavour, When many an important word Was lost and gone forever; Though, unlike others at the play, I never whispered: ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... reel deadened now, and the stride of Miltiades was perceptibly lessened and then became but a vigorous up-and-down hop, while the tense line sang in the gentle ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... night and twice a day on Sunday. It was worse even than that. One night—we were sitting out on the veranda—her scarf slipped, and I saw a scar on her arm, near her shoulder." Hardy stopped abruptly and began to roll a little pellet of bread between his thumb and his forefinger; then his tense expression faded and he sat back in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tense over the slavery issue when they arrived, and Ernestine's friends warned her not to mention the subject in her lectures. Unheeding she commented on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, but the press took no notice and her audiences showed ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... a feeble dash of spirit, Jenny had attempted tactical flight. The sense of it made her feel as she had done, as a little girl, in playing touch; when, with a swerve, she had striven to elude the pursuer. So tense were her nerves on such occasions that she turned what is called "goosey" with the ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... and dressed, and already some of the terrible frozen horror was gone from her face. She was still tense and devil-ridden, but ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... 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, and the run on the French ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... bottle, and the sprig of pine waved proudly from his bonnet, too. At every branch road they were joined by others, and when they neared the castle gates there was already quite a large group of people from the village as well. Every one was in a state of tense excitement, for the fate of all hung in the balance. Since the tenure of their homes was at the mercy of the new Laird, his ideas and disposition were of vital importance in their lives, and they were keen to see him and find out for themselves what manner of person he might ...
— The Scotch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... herd to war, which immediately and infallibly makes them forget everything, even their most cherished and hardwon public liberties and private interests, in the irresistible surge of their pugnacity and the tense pre-occupation of ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... been talking in the past tense of heroes and of knight-errants, but surely their day is not yet passed. When the earth has all been explored, when the last savage has been tamed, when the final cannon has been scrapped, and the world has settled down into unbroken virtue and ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the opposite end, was brought to a shock of tense balanced alertness. How much did he know? He gave no sign of emotion, but reached for a cigarette to cover any change in his breathing, fumbling perhaps ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... 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 ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... around her so that she could not get away by herself. Marie towered over her triumphantly. At last had come the chance to use her famous method of guarding. The crowd in the gallery leaned forward, tense and silent. The Mechanicals' forwards ran back under their basket to be in position to throw the ball in when Marie should send it down to them. The Washington guard threw the ball toward the massed group ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... crowd, I might waste my days unnoticed until such time as I could summon up sufficient resolution to put an end to my dead life. I had been ambitious—dwelling again amid the bitterness of the months that followed my return, I write in the past tense. I had been eager to make a name, a position for myself. But were I to claim no higher aim, I should be doing injustice to my blood—to the great-souled gentleman whose whole life had been an ode to honour, to her of simple faith who had known no other prayer to teach me than the childish ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... another link with the Cromwellian Wars. I remember, some forty years ago, my uncle, Sir Charles Cave, of whom I am glad to say I can speak in the present tense, told me that he was shooting on one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath. The tenant of the land was a very old farmer, and he informed my uncle that his grandmother, who lived to a great age, but whom he had just known ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... the past year again showed the value of the United Nations in bringing about the peaceful adjustment of tense international controversies. In Indonesia and in Palestine the efforts of the United Nations have put a stop to bloodshed and paved the way ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... there was an expression of well-nigh ludicrous doubt and amazement. He glanced from one to the other. The giant shifted his own tense look from me to the Irishman. A gleam of approval lighted in his eyes. He loosed me, and gripped O'Keefe's arm. "Staerk!" he said. "Ja—strong, and with a strong heart. A man—ja! He ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... an order in Aguinaldo's handwriting dated Malolos, September 13 (?), 1898, [188] shows how tense was the situation while the question of withdrawal of the Insurgent forces from the city of Manila was under consideration. It contains instructions for General Pio del Pilar, General P. Garcia and General Noriel or Colonel Cailles. Their purpose is hardly ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... talk like that," thought Green, as he went off, followed by his two men. "Everybody speaks of poor Tom in the past tense, from the colonel to Gubbins. I won't believe that he is dead till I see it; as for the ambulance, they have had plenty of work, and might easily miss him, if he is senseless, and ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... the child's tense little face with its long, Eastern eyes and the mouth that showed so vividly scarlet against its ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... and modistes all over the land for six months were now dwindling daily. The superintendent and the "boss" walked through the department every day, and we heard them talk about overproduction. Friday the atmosphere was tense with anxiety. The girls' faces were grave. Almost without exception, there were people at home upon whom this annual "lay-off" fell with tragic force. I have not talked with one of them who did not have to work, and they have ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite time, but indicates a process at no time begun and at no time complete, their doctrine could not be expressed by our past-perfect tense begotten. When they compared the derivation of the Son of God from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... those mental images that are the replica of former experiences. It is the faculty of the mind by which we recognize remembered experiences as a part of our own past. If it were not for this sense of familiarity and of ownership and of the past tense of recalled mental images, there would be no way for us to distinguish the sense-perceptions of the past ...
— Power of Mental Imagery • Warren Hilton
... half-drowsy ears, was amused by the colloquy that ensued, in the course of which Andy completely floored the Canadian by a glowing description of Dunore, delivered in the present tense, but referring, alas! to a period of sixteen or twenty years previously. But the smart black-eyed backwoodsman wound up with the ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... 1836. The tense used in the original is future. What is meant, however, is that the great deity does these acts at the beginning of every Kalpa when he recreates the Earth. All cycles or Kalpas are similar in respect of the incidents that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... ordeal cast no shadow over Corporal. He was declaring his passionate devotion, by wild tense springs at Phelan's face, seeking in vain to overcome the cruel limitation of a physiognomy that made kissing ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... breast, continued to regard the melancholy figure opposite with a moody eye. It seemed a long minute before he broke the tense silence by a sigh of discomfort. "I do not discuss these things with anybody," he said then, coldly. "If I had known who you were, I don't ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... great events in South Africa has somewhat dimmed the recollection of our smaller troubles in previous years; but perhaps there are some who can recall the feeling of tense suspense that enthralled the nation during ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... knight, standing for ever in his shadowy mortuary niche in the gloom of some Gothic chapel. Drops of cold sweat trickled over the broad, sallow forehead. An incredible fearlessness looked out from every tense feature. His eyes of fire were fixed and tearless; he seemed to be watching some struggle in the darkness beyond him. Stormy thoughts passed swiftly across a face whose firm decision spoke of a character of no common order. His whole person, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... with a sharp click, into the catch. The noise startles me afresh; jarring, horribly, on my tense nerves. After that, I stand, for a long while, amid an ever-growing quietness. All at once, my knees begin to tremble, and I have ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... graces of the First Violin. Alma's countenance shone—possibly with the joy of the artist, perhaps only with gratified vanity. As she grew warm, the rosy blood mantled in her cheeks and flushed her neck. Every muscle and nerve tense as the strings from which she struck music, she presently swayed forward on the points of her feet, and seemed to gain in stature, to become a more commanding type. Her features suggested neither force of intellect or originality of character: but they had beauty, and something more. She stood a ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... from the preterperfect tense of bend. The space lying between two promontories or headlands, being wider and smaller than a gulf, but larger than a bay. It is also used generally for any coast-bend or indentation, and is mostly held as a synonym ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of the drums and cries. The wailing of the women behind the temple died. The tense air pulsed with electricity. A cock crowed feebly in the village. Then at a rippling splash of the drums and the sudden screaming of the wizards, they began to push the idol. The base had already been loosened in the earth ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... fours, began to quarter over the ground like a bloodhound seeking a trail. Every sense in him seemed to quicken to the hunt. His alert eyes narrowed in concentration. His fingertips, as he crept forward, touched the sand soft as velvet. His body was tense as a coiled spring. No cougar stalking its prey could have been more ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... material results of trade. That he is not a business man—and a successful one—my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... if you don't feel"—the tremor vanishes, the lips gently set, and only the color remains. But he hears the first soft moan of the tense string under the bow, and a second, and another; and then, as he rests his elbows upon the table before him, and covers his face in his trembling hands, it seems to him as if his own lost heart had entered into that ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... saws themselves are subsequently tightened by forcing home the keys until a certain amount of tension has been attained, this is ascertained only by the peculiar sound which emanates from the blade on being drawn considerably tight and tense. Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of the 27th of February—new style—was tense with an ominous expectancy. In the Allied chancelleries anxious groups were gathered. They realized that the fate of the Allies hung in the balance. In Petrograd alone three hundred thousand workers went out on strike that day, and ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... must indulge me in a long parenthesis. I beg him to bear me witness that I never made one before. This parenthesis is on the tense that I am obliged to use in sending to the press these minutes. The reader observes that the last transactions mentioned happen in April and May, 1871. Those to be narrated are the sequence of those already told. Speaking of them in 1870 with the coarse tenses of the English language is ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... eagerly for the choicest morsels,—and the bounty and providence it suggests. Or the chopper in the woods,—the prostrate tree, the white new chips scattered about, his easy triumph over the cold, coat hanging to a limb, and the clear, sharp ring of his axe. The woods are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instrument. Or the road-breakers, sallying forth with oxen and sleds in the still, white world, the day after the storm, to restore the lost track and demolish the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... hair brush did its work. Usually in such case Bobby howled before the first blow fell, but to-night he set his lips and uttered no sounds. Slap! slap! slap! slap! with deliberate spaces between. Bobby was released. He climbed down, his soul tense, with agony, ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... showing 'em the way through the Narrers to ketch the Shark!" he growled; and he kept on his way till the imperative mood present tense was tried, and then he made for the side of the cutter, to receive what was to him a regular knock-down blow, or, as he put it, a wind taking him on ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... silence, sitting tense and mute, scarcely even breathing, while the pale blue eyes opposite remained steadily and ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the wondrous test of courage and endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... the bow of the canoe pulled in against the bank. Before he could recover sufficiently from his surprise to speak she had stepped aboard and he could hear her adjusting a cushion beneath her knees. Then came her tense whispered warning: ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... moment at one of the deck windows, gazing at the stars; and for no reason at all I realized I was tense. Johnson was a great one for his regular sleep—it was wholly unlike him to be roaming about the ship at such an hour. Had he been watching me? I told myself it was nonsense. I was suspicious ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... really in need of that myself. When it seemed as if one more step would kill us, we reached the rim, and fell panting with labored chests and dripping skins. We could not speak. Jones had worn a pair of ordinary shoes without thick soles and nails, and it seemed well to speak of them in the past tense. They were split into ribbons and hung on by the laces. His feet were cut ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... 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 ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... with the din. His plans were vague and unformed. He had one picture of some commanding position from which he could address the multitudes, another of meeting Ostrog face to face. He was full of rage, of tense muscular excitement, his hands gripped, ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... night had just fallen, and there was an incomplete moon in the west. But already the desert was full of feeble shadows and silver interspaces, and all that tense silence of ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... senses in forgetfulness of the world and its cares? On a sudden he starts from his couch with an appearance of frenzy!—his nostrils dilated, his eyes gleaming with immoderate excitation—an incipient curse quivering on his lips, and every vein swelling—every muscle tense with fearful and passionate energy of purpose. Is he possessed with a devil, or does he meditate suicide, that his manner is so wild and hurried? With impetuous velocity he rushes to the window, and beneath his vehement but futile strokes, aimed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... they made but a murmur compared to the whirlwind of sound that had arisen from the pit at the former struggles I had witnessed. There seemed but few blocks of the stock on the market. Yet the air was electric with the tense strain of thousands of minds eager to catch the faintest indication of the final result, and I found it more exciting than the wildest days of ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... "Don't tense up, I won't," I told her. At the same time I made myself the little promise that if I ever got to feeling restless, that is, restless and bad, I'd just go ahead and punch the button and see what happened—sort ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... sat at the end of the table and ate with the tired, quiet soldiers. Now, the landlady was interested in him. Her brow was knit rather tense, there was a look of panic in her large, healthy face, but her small brown eyes were fixed most dangerously. She was a big woman, but her eyes were small and tense. She drew near the stranger. She wore a rather loud-patterned flannelette blouse, ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... a tense silence in the dressing tent, broken only by the patter of the rain drops on the canvas roof, while the show's surgeon was ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... unless she were strangely mistaken that form out there was Danglar's. She watched him as he headed toward a small building that loomed up like a black, irregular shadow across the courtyard, and which was Shluker's shop—watched him in a tense, fascinated way. She was in time, then—only—only somehow now her limbs seemed to have become weak and powerless. It seemed suddenly as though she craved with all her soul the protecting shadows of the tenement, and that every impulse bade her cling there, flattened ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... a strange, tense voice, "you are mad. You do not know what you ask. Virginia is not for such as you. Tell me that she does not know of your feelings toward her. Tell me that she does not reciprocate your love. Tell me the truth, man." Professor Maxon seized von Horn roughly by both shoulders, his glittering ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had been given a sudden conviction that after all there was something behind this disturbance. I saw, during the whole of the rest of that day, Grogoff's strange face with the exalted, bewildered eyes, the excited mouth, the body tense and strained as though waiting for a blow. And now, always when I look back I see Boris Grogoff standing in the doorway of the "Cave de la Grave" like a ghost from ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... leap and become tense. He saw the man's color go, saw his cheeks whiten; observed that his eyes widened and gleamed with mingled astonishment ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... was a steam-ship of 2200 tons burthen, her length 336 feet, and her extreme breadth 60. She was of 1000 horse-power, with 81- inch cylinders, and a stroke of 12 feet. I speak of her in the past tense, because she has since been totally cast away in a storm on Lake Erie. This lake bears a very bad character, and persons are warned not to venture upon it at so stormy a season of the year as September, but, had the weather ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... that the perfect tense denotes an act begun in the past and completed in the present. Does its use sufficiently tell when a thing is or ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... have an instrument 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- blade. This excruciating instrument, I warn any one ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Satan? Yehudas, what is that but Jews? And then homox, how very near to the Latin homo! I think, too, that I have even got a notion of some of the grammatical forms of the language. That termination of en, as in deluden, salubren, seems to me the sign of the present tense of the plural form of the verb. That other termination of tar, as in ebuntar, carantar, I suppose to be the sign of the infinitive. Depend upon it that this language is one of absolute regularity, undeformed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... said, breaking a tense silence and with a sudden stress in his voice. "Don't leave me. Stop with me yet—for a little while.... You ... ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... liquid ease, he was on his feet, body tense, alert. Her form was vaguely familiar as she ran toward him. She dodged from his sight, then re-appeared as the winding path cut ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... figure, but her cranny did not serve her to show her the two where they were now; she knelt on her knees in ignorant suspense. Slowly and with a patient force Rudolf began to work his enemy's arms towards one another. Rupert had read his design in his eyes and resisted with tense muscles. It seemed as though his arms must crack; but at last they moved. Inch by inch they were driven closer; now the elbows almost touched; now the wrists joined in reluctant contact. The sweat broke out ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... voice was cooler, steadier, now. The first great strain had subsided. He was cool, tense, now—though not a whit less determined ...
— The Submarine Boys' Lightning Cruise - The Young Kings of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... pushed the attack, but never lost control of myself nor became reckless. It was an inspiriting revelation to me to find that I could indeed use my head intelligently, and command my motions so well, at a time of such excitement. We grew hot, perspired, breathed fast and loud, kept our muscles tense, and held each other with glittering eyes as we moved about on firm but springy feet. We must have fought very swiftly, for the ring of the steel sounded afterward in my ears as if it had been almost continuous. How long we kept it up, I do not exactly know. We came to panting more deeply, and ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... when at last we rose to our feet, Lord K., finding his visitor wholly unconvinced, drew himself up to his full height. He seemed to tower over the Attache, who was himself a tall man, and—well, it is hard to set down in words the happenings of a tense situation. The scene was one that I never shall forget, as, by his demeanour rather than by any words of his, Lord K. virtually issued a command that no Serb soldier was to cross the Bulgar border unless the Bulgars embarked on hostilities. The Attache stood still a moment; ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell |
