"Half-light" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... What had come over him? He shook himself, and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall, boyishly straight figure dominated the little place. In the half-light he looked, indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always looked like Graham's brother, anyhow; it was one of Natalie's complaints against him. But he put the thought of Natalie away, along with his new ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... fall the cat he had taken in his hand to thrash me with, and once more pulled out from his pocket the revolver; but, in the half-light that lingered now after the sunset glow had faded out of the sky, I noticed, as I screwed my neck round, looking to see what he was doing, that his hand trembled. The next moment he dropped the revolver on the deck as he had ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... talking at once, Vincent's name was merely an unimportant contribution to the general hubbub. He saw no one he knew, he was almost the only man there, and for a time found himself penned up in a corner, reduced to wait patiently until Mabel should discover him in the cool half-light which ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... scowling out of his window, I staring out of mine at an eddying haze which, thinning out ever and anon, showed vague shapes that peeped forth only to be lost again, spectral trees, barns and ricks, looming unearthly in the half-light. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... supported Petion rather than Lafayette. And so Bailly and his Feuillants, long waning like the Moon, had to withdraw then, making some sorrowful obeisance, into extinction;—or indeed into worse, into lurid half-light, grimmed by the shadow of that Red Flag of theirs, and bitter memory of the Champ-de-Mars. How swift is the progress of things and men! Not now does Lafayette, as on that Federation-day, when his noon was, 'press his sword ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... applied to the glass with a clear white varnish, and when dry, a preparation is finally applied, which increases the transparency, and adds tenfold brilliancy to the effect. There is another design, printed in imitation of the half-light (abatiour;) this is used principally for a ground, covering the whole surface of the glass, within which (the necessary spaces having been previously cut out before it is stuck on the glass,) are placed medallion centres of Watteau ...
— Young's Demonstrative Translation of Scientific Secrets • Daniel Young
... the candles on the table, not noticing in the half-light that the smoke from them was growing denser as they ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... they watched the long, golden going down of the sun, and the creeping shadows, and the purple half-light, and the after-smile upon the crests. And then the heaven gathered itself in its night stillness, and the mountains were grand in the soft gloom, until the full moon came ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed composed of staring shadows. They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... light was dawning there; he could just detect the outline of an opening—a half-light breaking the otherwise ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... by a startling occurrence. A door on the floor above opened; there was a swift patter of feet, and then from overhead, a long-drawn, terrible cry. Immediately a young girl, her shawl drawn about her face, ran from the darkness into the half-light of the lower hall and would have passed between them but that Norman Hale ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... long-lingering half-light of the most superb of evenings we return'd to Denver, where I staid several days leisurely exploring, receiving impressions, with which I may as well taper off this memorandum, itemizing what I saw there. The best was the men, three-fourths ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... now she possessed herself again. She grew quiet and silent, and even solemn. But Pete rattled on with cheerful talk about the day's doings. At the doors of the houses on the road as they passed, people were standing in the half-light to wave them salutations, and Pete sent back his answers in shouts and laughter. Turning the bridge they saw a little group at the porch ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... doing now?" thought Foma, picturing to himself the woman, alone, in the corner of a narrow room, in the reddish half-light. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... no heavy glooms. The light breaks through everywhere. The forms of the trees are light and piny; the red soil is seen, the roots of the trees, the broken turf, the sandy ground. All the colors are delightfully broken up in the mysterious half-light which confuses the outlines of every object, without making them shadowy. Such a picture one might see with half-shut eyes in a sunny wood, if one had more poetry than prose in one's head, and were well read in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... water under the eyes of the sailors waiting with their oars poised above the sea, in the shape they knew; Christopher Mason. But once he dived under, in order to seek out the treacherous channel in the half-light, he needed his fish's eyes and senses. He therefore would swim a few yards as a fish, but had to surface again as himself in order to let the men see him, and call: "The length of two boats, keeping to starboard, boys. Then ease her over this ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... learned, were about sixteen hours long on this dying planet. It was toward midnight when they started out from the ship toward the violet dome. The strange half-light still hovered over the ground. In the sky, splinters of mauve tore at curtains of purplish flame. Something like northern lights, they glinted and gleamed, wrestled and writhed. There was no peace up there in that abandoned sky. But there was enough of that unearthly light glimmering below for him ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... elderly gentleman with a drooping air of defiance that was probably the remaining vestige of self-respect in an individual who had ceased to defy successfully anybody or anything. His clothes could scarcely be called shabby, at least they passed muster in the half-light, but one's imagination could not have pictured the wearer embarking on the purchase of a half-crown box of chocolates or laying out ninepence on a carnation buttonhole. He belonged unmistakably to that forlorn orchestra to whose piping no one dances; he was one of the world's lamenters who ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... branches all give one a curious sense of unreality, especially on a moonlight night. It is like a Gustave Dore drawing of a bewitched forest. The Guardsman splashed about in the shallow water, but never a sign of an alligator did we see. Giant tortoises crawled lazily about, just visible in the half-light under the trees; innumerable land-crabs scurried to and fro, and unclean reptiles pattered over the fetid ooze, but we saw no more alligators than we should have seen in ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... What more likely than that Matilda, in her amazement, should reveal the house's secret? But the half-light of the room was a very obliging ally against such ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... the bank. Fergus glanced over his shoulder, saw the other hurrying, and hurried himself in order to take up a good position for seeing the cashier's face. He was in the middle of the treacherous floor before he perceived that it was not Macbean in the half-light behind the counter, but a good-looking man whom he ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... nice white kid glove from her right hand, and extending one small taper forefinger, rubbed it over the surface of the black-walnut tree; then she pointed meaningly at the piece of furniture, which plainly, even in the half-light, disclosed an unhousewifely streak. She also showed the dusty forefinger to the other lady, and they both nodded ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized everything that he trusted and believed in—a cool, dispassionate seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality. Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress. It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity. The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... cut, thanks!" Her eyes held a pained embarrassment. He caught the look, and her eyelids flickered and fell before his gaze, and then, as the footman repaired the damage, she sank back once more into the half-light beyond the radiance of the candles. "How shy she is!" thought Burnaby. "So many of these English women are. She's an important woman in her own right, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of the fire. The men stood about in awkward silence, panting with heat and weariness. Sir Redmond was ostentatiously filling his pipe. Beatrice knew him by his straight, soldierly pose. In the drab half-light they were all mere black outlines of men, and, for the most part, she could not distinguish one from another. Keith Cameron she knew; instinctively by his slim height, and by the way he carried his head. Unconsciously, she leaned down from the high ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... dead; I stood up, trembling in every limb. I saw her in that instant as a maid of olden time, singing the love-songs of some far-off day beside her native instrument, and of a voluptuous beauty there was no withstanding. The half-light of the dusk set her in a frame ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... the ray of sunlight passing through a hole made in one of them took on the colours of the rainbow, and, striking the opposite wall, sketched upon it a parti-coloured picture of the outlines of roofs, trees, and the clothes suspended in the yard, only upside down. This gave the room a peculiar half-light. ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... for a time with her eyes fixed on the floor, then she raised her head and looked around at the void in which silence had fixed itself. The globe-lamps burning, here and there, at the walls, filled the drawing-room with a hazy, half-light, in which, here and there, glittered golden reflections, and the features of faces, and landscapes flimmered on pictures. Farther on, from the shady corner of the other drawing-room, slender and swelling ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... door as she had done previously and he sat in the same seat he had occupied the night before. He had a sense of intrusion—he felt that he was being tolerated. Helen had removed the bandage from her wrist and she looked very handsome in the half-light of a screened electric bulb. He noticed that flowers had been placed in one of the vases on the mantelshelf and that the mandarin skirt clung a trifle less precisely to the polished surface of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... at a swift gallop, the girl in front not so much as turning her head to see if he were following, their way leading along the bank of Indian Creek and through the gloomy half-light which sifted down through the mesh of branches of the big trees reaching high overhead. Then she left the road for a narrow trail which wound through trees and bushes down into the creek-bed and across it, coming out through the trees upon the dry grass-covered plain to the east. And now again ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... a sentiment which we would perhaps disown at once upon its being unmasked and which many refuse to obey upon its appeal to them to act in accordance with its principles. This indicates that society sees many of its assailants in but a half-light. It observes neither their malice nor strength but only a dark ugly form which irritates us and which we would if we could banish ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... deeply dejected, silent group that stood in this weird half-light, awaiting the development of Roland's mind regarding them; he, the youngest of their company, quiet, unemotional, whose dominion no one now ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... visitor with a puzzled air, but concealed his surprise. The stranger seemed to him to be strangely furtive and sinister, standing in the half-light, ears twitching, a clipped skull thrust forward on a short neck like the head of a turtle pushing ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... young cottonwoods, upon the low shanty, in front of which sat the cattleman in his shirt-sleeves, thoughtfully chewing a quid. The growl of a dog at his feet discovered her to him at the same moment, and, as he squinted in the half-light at her thin little form and cropped head, she seemed like some strange prairie fay coming, light-footed, out of ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... hour or two of tensity, it was a relief to be face to face with my man, I able to read his, if I could, he able to read mine. It was only in the grey half-light of his hole in the rocks, but, at least, we should look each other in the eyes, as men wish to do when they are acting honestly towards each other, even if later they ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... the dawn on pretence that it was time to ride; that then I should be given the opportunity of escape and instantly shot down. Or it might be pretended that I had tried to escape, with a like result. Who, they urged, was to know in that half-light whether I had or had not actually attempted to run for my life, or to threaten their lives, circumstances under which the law said it was justifiable to shoot a prisoner already ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... floor. The flat consisted of a kitchen and a room with one window. Even when the sun was most lavish of his rays, it was none too light there; now, in the early-falling dusk of a dull late autumn day, Wilhelm found himself in a dim half-light as he opened the door. There was no fire in the stove, no lamp upon the table. In the cold and darkness he could just distinguish among the sparse furniture a slim, wretched-looking woman sitting on a chair by the table, nursing a baby wrapped ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... listening to the last faint echo of his cries; then he turned slowly and walked through the half-light back to his lonely store. Over to his right, above the horizon the red sun leapt. He did not raise his eyes; but, as he walked, he whispered over and over to himself words which seemed incredible, "And, if it had not been for her, I ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... as though there was a dark terror upon him; and then, in the light of the dying embers, the Father saw a thing rise upon the hearth, as though it had slept there, and woke to stretch itself. And then in the half-light it seemed softly to gambol and play; but whereas when an innocent beast does this in the simple joy of its heart, and seems a fond and pretty sight, the Father thought he had never seen so ugly a sight as the beast gambolling all by itself, as if it could not contain its own dreadful ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... In the half-light jean beheld a lady so different from all he had ever set eyes on till that moment that he could form no notion of what she was, no idea of her beauty or her age. Never had he seen eyes that flashed so vividly in a face of such ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... I've dined in town! Really it's great fun, I feel as if I had come out of a tomb—" she checked herself: but she might have been as indiscreet as she liked, for her companions were not listening. Laura was faintly, very faintly startled by their attitude—Hyde leaning forward in the half-light of the brougham to button Isabel's glove—but she was soon smiling at her own fancy. "Poor Isabel, poor simple Isabel!" She was only a child ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... dull half-light of the corridor lay a woman, most superbly formed. She was dark, and the thick masses of her hair, ready for the hairdresser, fell in a tangle over her beautifully chiselled features and full, rounded shoulders and neck. A scarlet bathrobe, loosened at the ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... against the flow of cars carrying day-shift workers through the half-light. He whirled into Walnut Street, twisted a fresh copy of the Morning Herald into a fiendishly clever knot, and hurled it in the general direction of a front porch that flashed past on his right. Never slowing, Gary threw the next paper entirely ...
— Stopover Planet • Robert E. Gilbert
... exploring in the half-light the large circular layer which supported the upper cone of the mountain. Before taking any rest, he wished to know if it was possible to get round the base of the cone in the case of its sides being too steep and its summit being inaccessible. This question preoccupied him, for it ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... picks, coal-heavers with great loads to shovel, Americans busy about some work which was a mere matter of strength—and they touched her fancy. Toil, now that she was free of it, seemed even a more desolate thing than when she was part of it. She saw it through a mist of fancy—a pale, sombre half-light, which was the essence of poetic feeling. Her old father, in his flour-dusted miller's suit, sometimes returned to her in memory, revived by a face in a window. A shoemaker pegging at his last, a blastman seen through a narrow window in some basement where ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... be getting back to Willett," said Mount quietly. "As for me, my errand is done, and the strange, fishy smells of New York town stifle me. I'm stale and timid, and I like not the shape of the gallows yonder. My health requires the half-light of the woods, Mr. Renault, and the friendly shadows which lie at hand like rat-holes in a granary. I've drunk all the ale at the Bull's-Head—weak stuff it was—and they've sent for more, but I can't wait. So we're off to the north to-night, friend, and we'll presently rinse our throats of this ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... the startled Sarah at the same time, with one spring Blue Bonnet was at the window. What she saw there was hardly reassuring; the whole space between the house and the stables seemed to be filled with a howling, whirling mass of men. In the gray half-light of early dawn she could recognize no one. Suddenly a fresh explosion set the windows rattling; there was a hiss and a glare of red. In the glow she caught a glimpse of Alec; he held a revolver and was shooting it with sickening rapidity, ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... sat in a corner, recalling what Alice had said in England and how she had looked. He pictured her standing in the dark-paneled library at the Garth, with eyes that sparkled as she spoke in his defense, sitting with a smile in the half-light by the big hearth in the hall, and waiting for him in the orchard. She moved through all the scenes with the same calm grace; even in her anger—and he had seen her angry—there was a proud reserve. But Alice stood above all other women; there was ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... in shape, three high narrow windows admitting the light through small, old-fashioned panes. Just at present there was not much to admit, for it was raining hard, and the afternoon was wearing on to dusk; but even the wet half-light showed you solid mahogany furniture, old-fashioned as the windows themselves, black and shining with age and polish; a carpet soft and thick, but its once rich hues dim and faded; oil paintings ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... he trod its shabby, straggling, ill-paved streets with glory in his face; and walking thus with hat in hand, and face illumined toward the setting sun, folks looked at him strangely and wondered who and what he was, and turned to look again. In that half-light of sunset, he seemed a ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... first time that people of the forest had paused on the hill at twilight to look down on Bradleyburg. The sight always seemed to intrigue and mystify the wild folk,—the shadowed street, the spire of the moldering church ghostly in the half-light, the long row of unpainted shacks, and the dim, pale gleam of an occasional lighted window. The old bull moose, in rutting days, was wont to pause and call, listen an instant for such answer as the twilight city might give him, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... my face grew pale, and thanked the half-light for concealment, or he must have noted. Who that "other lady" was, possessed for me no interest, and ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... in command raised a handkerchief on the point of his sword. Jack could barely make it out in the half-light. At the same moment the officer commanding the Germans opposing Frank's small ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... speak to him, but when he turned and smiled upon me with his cavernous sockets and his projecting grin as he went by, I thought I would not detain him. He was hardly gone when I heard the clacking again, and another one issued from the shadowy half-light. This one was bending under a heavy gravestone, and dragging a shabby coffin after him by a string. When he got to me he gave me a steady look for a moment or two, and then rounded to and backed up to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his feet. In the half-light of morning he saw the glint of a revolver. Wilson and Shadrack were beside him, and the farmer was sitting on the edge of his bed. They put their hands up—all except the farmer. The bluish flame of a sulphur match sputtered, then grew bright. Three Union soldiers stood ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop
... In the shadowy half-light of the room Shiela halted at a sign from the nurse; the doctor glanced up, nodding almost imperceptibly as the girl's eyes ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... months of self-criticism and retouching he would have the first layer of flesh painted upon his figures, and a good beginning made. "It was contrary to his habit to finish at one painting, and he used to say that a poet who improvises cannot hope to form pure verses." He would often produce a half-light with a rub of his finger, "or with a touch of the thumb he would dab a spot of dark pigment into some corner to strengthen it; or throw in a reddish stroke—a tear of blood so to speak—to break the parts ... ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... and the two ladies, Calyste heard the words confusedly. He seated himself in an arm-chair and looked furtively toward the marquise. In the soft half-light he saw, reclining on a divan, as if a sculptor had placed it there, a white and serpentine shape which thrilled him. Without being aware of it, Felicite had done her friend a service; the marquise was much superior to the unflattered portrait ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... his pupil Carlo Raimondi, the bearer of a name illustrious in the annals of engraving, we owe a striking portrait of Toschi. The master is represented on his seat upon the scaffold in the dizzy half-light of the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... man in the half-light not five yards below him. He fired and the man dropped, but he had used his rifle and the great spattering of earth showed his whereabouts. Now was the time for keen eye and steady arm. The enemy had halted thirty yards off and beneath the slope there ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... I—" He ended abruptly and thrust his head into the car, his eyes questing hers in the half-light; the chauffeur with his engine ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... fortifications of reserve, he was able to maintain just the right shade of dignity, when, in the half-light of the midwinter afternoon, Diane glided into the big, book-lined apartment, in which the comfortable air induced through long occupancy by people of means did not banish a certain sombreness. She entered with the subdued manner of one who has been sent ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... flitting up before him towards that grim slit in the wall through which the dim half-light of the summer night vaguely entered. Her light figure became visible to him as she reached it. There came to him a swift memory of the butterfly-beauty that had so astounded him ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... at once. He slipped on his clothes and went to the door. His eyes were used now to the dark, and there was a window that shed a half-light. ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... about the little porch of the house, packed closely around Barney and Sam, who said nothing, but followed Barney like his shadow. If the sun had been shining, it might not have happened as it did; but there was a semi-obscurity, a weird half-light shed by the thick sky and falling snow, which somehow encouraged the enraged ruffians, who pounded on the door just as the pleading voice of ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... differences in pigmentation and appearance of niece and uncle was dissipated by my consciousness that we were now moving in a dim half-light. We were in a fairly wide tunnel. Not far ahead the gleam filtered, pale yellow like sunlight sifting through the leaves of autumn poplars. And as we drove closer to its source I saw that it did indeed pass through a leafy screen hanging ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... overcast heavens with lurid splendor. Then the last rose tints faded from the sky; the horses plodded wearily through the water; on every side stretched the marsh, vast, lonely, desolate in the gray of the half-light. We overtook the ox-carts. The cattle strained in the yokes; the drivers wading alongside cracked their whips and uttered strange cries; the carts rocked and swayed as the huge wheels churned through the ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... to breakfast, Jaquetta and I, feeling very dreary in the half-light, and as if desolation had suddenly come on us; and when we heard her fly drive up to the door, Jaquetta cried out almost angrily, "Torwood, how could you!" and we would have run away, but he said, "Stay, dear girls; it is ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... after the light through which they had just passed, they could not for a few moments discern the objects contained therein. Then, as their eyes became more accustomed to the half-light, they perceived, hanging on the wall, strange instruments of iron and wood, and in different places in the apartment were standing curious-looking machines, the use of which they could only ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... which Mrs. Bliss sat. I could not resist the inclination to whisper in Jack's ear: 'What do you think of that?' We both turned with the intention of taking another look at 'That,' but it had disappeared and the gas was burning at about half-light. ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... centred in her. The feeling grew so intense that it thrilled my nerves like electric sparks. We entered the hall. There was nobody there; not even the lamps were lit, the only light came in fitful gleams from the open stoves. In this half-light and in silence I began to relieve Aniela of her furs, when suddenly the warmth emanating from her body seemed to enter into my veins; I put my arm around her, and drawing her close to me I pressed my lips ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... summer of 1851 I went to dine every day at the Conciergerie with my two sons and my two imprisoned friends. These great hearts and great minds, Vacquerie, Meurice, Charles, and Francois Victor, attracted men of like quality. The livid half-light that crept in through latticed and barred windows disclosed a family circle at which there often assembled eloquent orators, among others Cremieux, and powerful ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... investigate light and shade in their various intricate relations, it may be proper to notice a few of the more palpable and self-evident combinations; and for the better comprehending of which I shall divide them into five parts, viz.: Light, half-light, middle tint, half-dark and dark. When a picture is chiefly composed of light and half-light, the darks will have more force and point, but without the help of strong color to give it solidity it will be apt to look feeble, and when a picture is composed mainly of dark and half-dark ...
— Crayon Portraiture • Jerome A. Barhydt
... stopped abruptly; he had been examining the foot of the embankment, and was standing quite still, watching. The plate-layer followed his glance, and also stood fixed. After a few moments' silence the two men looked at each other and smiled. In the half-light of the valley they had seen the outline of a gendarme; he was on foot and appeared to be looking for somebody, while making no attempt ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... entering, it is difficult to distinguish any thing in the half-light. The narrow Gothic casements of the whole floor are closed, both those toward the street and those facing inward upon the inner court. The outer wooden shutters are also closely fastened. The marchesa would ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... Friday, July 21, we were within a hundred miles of the island, and we encountered the ice in the half-light. I waited for the full day and then tried to push through. The little craft was tossing in the heavy swell, and before she had been in the pack for ten minutes she came down on a cake of ice and broke the bobstay. Then the water- inlet of the motor choked with ice. The schooner ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the Judge. "I know you." The other peered at him in the half-light. "My name's Molehill. We met ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... beam was broken. The vagabonds recovered their courage; soon the heavy joist, raised like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was flung with fury against the great door which they had tried to batter down. At the sight of that long beam, in the half-light which the infrequent torches of the brigands spread over the Place, thus borne by that crowd of men who dashed it at a run against the church, one would have thought that he beheld a monstrous beast with a thousand feet attacking with lowered ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... In the half-light of the coming day he looked supernatural—a strange spirit from under the earth or above the earth, but not of the earth. This was borne in upon Patsy's consciousness, and it set her Celtic blood tingling and her ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... that the doctor loved my sister through me—that I found some strange place in his great love for her, to which I had no title, but was most glad to have. For, then, in the sheltering half-light, he lifted me from my bed—crushed me against his breast—held me there, whispering messages I could not hear—and gently laid me down again, and went in haste away. And I dressed in haste: but fumbled at all the buttons, nor could quickly lay hands on my clothes, which were scattered ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... soft half-light pervaded the studio; but a parting ray of the evening sunlight suddenly illuminated the spot where the soldier sat, so that his noble, blanched face, his black hair, and his clothes were bathed in its glow. The effect was simple enough, but to the girl's Italian imagination ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... the dog was at his side. Then the man turned away, and, accompanied by Alice, left the room. In the passage he paused, and Alice saw an expression on his face she had never seen before. He was nervous and excited, and his eyes shone in the half-light. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... of flour-sacks—everything had its designated place, from floor to roof. In one of the corners a stairway led to the cellar, where venerable hogsheads of wine with copper bands could be glimpsed in the half-light and where enormous metal tanks ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... me, who had never seen aught of any land save England, these new surroundings were exceeding strange and wonderful. Although it was yet but a half-light all round us on shore, the giant peak of Orizaba, rising high and magnificent across the land to the north-west, was already blazing in the saffron-colored tints of early morning, while directly above us the ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... himself; the motionless great bulk in the corner of the slayer of spies and gendarmes; Yakovlitch, the veteran of ancient terrorist campaigns; the woman, with her hair as white as mine and the lively black eyes, all in a mysterious half-light, with the strongly lighted map of Russia on the table. The woman I had the opportunity to see again. As we were waiting for the lift she came hurrying along the corridor, with her eyes fastened on Miss Haldin's face, and drew her aside ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... In the dim half-light I furtively scan the set faces around me and find myself wondering what thoughts those impassive masks conceal. Are they counting the cost? Most of them have been through the ordeal before. Pale faces there are—small wonder when one thinks of what lies ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... did another hairy body protrude from any of the numerous cave mouths from the high-flung abode of the chief to the habitations of the more lowly members of the tribe nearer the cliff's base. Then he moved outward upon the sheer face of the white chalk wall. In the half-light of the baby moon it appeared that the heavy, shaggy black figure moved across the face of the perpendicular wall in some miraculous manner, but closer examination would have revealed stout pegs, as large around as a man's wrist protruding from holes in the cliff into which they were driven. ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of a freethinking turn of mind. She whispered that the jadoo was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son's name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... Immediately after, to use a slang term, they "mixed." Presently Cal, stretched the long length of him in the grass, with Pink sitting comfortably upon his middle, looked up at the dizzying swim of the moon, saw new and uncharted stars, and nearer, dimly revealed in the half-light, the self-satisfied, cherubic ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... me. In the first place, it took from me a hope long cherished,—that of recovering a mother as loving as yours, of whose adorable tenderness, dear friend, you have so often told me. After all, it was a half-light thrown upon the fogs of my life without even allowing me to know whether I was or was not the child of a legitimate marriage. It also seemed to me that such paternal intimations addressed to a ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... often had the occasion to notice, that the first entrance into one of our vast American forests is apt to reduce the greatest talker to silence. In the present instance, I found the truth of this remark fully confirmed. Whether it was the subdued half-light of the luxuriant wilderness through which we were passing, the solemn stillness, only broken by the rustling of the dead leaves under our feet, or the colossal dimensions of the mighty trees, that rose like so many giants around us, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Indian sunk, and his carbine went clanging down the rocks, burying itself in the snow. Another warrior rose slightly, took aim, but Johnson's six-shooter cracked again, and the Indian settled slowly down without firing. A squaw moved slowly in the half-light to where the buck lay. Bordeson drew a bead ...
— Crooked Trails • Frederic Remington
... average man, clean-shaven, and superbly built, with every muscle ready and even eager for use. His thirty years sat lightly upon him, though his dark hair was already slightly grey at the temples, for his great brown eyes were boyish and always would be. In the half-light, his clean-cut profile was outlined against the sky, and his mouth trembled perceptibly. He had neither the thin, colourless lips that would have made men distrust him, nor the thick lips that would have warned women to go slowly with him and to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Reggie opened Riley's mail in the half-light of the room, and gave him the sheet—not the envelope—of a letter to Riley from the Directors. Riley said he would thank Reggie not to interfere with his private papers, specially as Reggie knew he was too weak to open his ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... now brightened; the room was filled with a faint, flickering light. Misty, vaporous, tormenting shadows danced and twisted oddly in the shifting glimmer: in the tenebrous half-light the occupants looked grey, weary, and haggard, their faces strangely distorted by the alternate rise and fall of the shadows. Arkhipov's bald head with its tightly stretched skin resembled ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... falling, and as the shadows stole upon this silent city, a gloom unrelieved by any homely twinkle of light, these dreadful streets, these stricken homes took on an aspect more sinister and forbidding in the half-light. Behind those flapping curtains were pits of gloom full of unimagined terrors whence came unearthly sounds, stealthy rustlings, groans and sighs and sobbing voices. If ghosts did flit behind those crumbling walls, surely they were very sad and ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... in the direction of the Tudor garden. The place was bathed in a sort of purple half-light, lending it a fairy air of unreality, as though banished sun and rising moon yet disputed for mastery over earth. This idea set me thinking of Colin Camber, of Osiris, whom he had described as a black god, and of Isis, whose silver disk now held undisputed ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... her attic that night she found that her deal box had been carried up and placed in one corner, and as she began to undress in the half-light she caught sight of something else which certainly had not been there before. Something standing in the window twisted and prickly, but to her most pleasant to look upon. Could it really be the cactus? She went up to it, half afraid to find that she was ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... barn. There was still only dusky half-light. He pulled the doors almost shut behind him, leaving only a four-inch gap to see through. Now the car was safely out of sight and there was no sign that any living ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... and despair, Are but a mingling, as of day and night; The globe, surrounded by deceptive air, Is all enveloped in the same half-light. ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... there are dark churches, with massive, tall pillars; the light falls softly through the painted glass, regilding the golden woodwork, the angels and the saints and the bishops in their mitres. The air is heavy with incense, and women in mantillas kneel in the half-light, praying silently. Now and then I come across an old house with a fragment of Moorish work, reminding me that here again the Moors have left ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... but few sights more melancholy than the wave-washed derelict—the now desolate, helpless and forlorn thing that was once a ship, the home of men—seen in the half-light of a winter dawn, rising and falling sluggishly on the dirty grey swell—the aftermath of storm—with white water washing through its broken bulwarks, yards and sails adrift, a thing without life ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... representatives of France, vote with the "Mountain," while the Jacobin president, far from turning them out, himself invites them "to set aside all obstacles prejudicial to the welfare of the people.." In this gesticulating crowd, in the half-light of smoky lamps, amidst the uproar of the galleries, it is difficult to hear well what motion is put to vote; it is not easy to see who rises or sits down, and two decrees pass, or seem to pass, one releasing Hebert and his accomplices, and the other revoking the commission of the Twelve.[34133] ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... she said. He turned, and saw very clearly, against the half-light, her startled eyes. Her hands were pressed against her dress and holly had fallen at her feet. He saw, too, that the nursery ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... red light, which changed to green as I looked at it. As the train moved on with increasing speed, the detective counted the carriages, and noted down the number. It was now dark, with the thin crescent of the moon hanging in the western sky throwing a weird half-light on the shining metals. The rear lamps of the train disappeared around a curve, and the signal stood at baleful red again. The black magic of the lonesome night in that strange place impressed me, but the detective was a most practical man. He placed his back against the signal-post, ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... of Saint Peter's-by-the-Sea was filled even on this hot July afternoon, to hear the famous Bishop, and in the half-light that fell through painted windows and lay like a dim violet veil against the gray walls, the congregation with summer gowns and flowery hats, had a billowy effect as of a wave tipped everywhere with foam. Fielding, sitting far back, saw only the white-robed Bishop, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... to the foot of the stairs and called, but there came no answer. Seeing that the door of the little drawing-room was open, he entered. The room was bathed in the half-light that came from the four dull panes of mica in the front of the great stove. As his eyes grew used to the shadows he saw his wife curled in an arm-chair. He went to her. "Why, Grace." he said, "didn't you hear me ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... In the half-light of the room, with the late sunshine pressing warm against the drawn green shades, the remote shouts of children coming to them through the quiet, and the whir of a lawn-mower off somewhere, they crouched, these two, as though they would ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... the road was a ruined trench, and even in the weird half-light of the flares we could see what a shambles they had become. The road was well called ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... open air a little while, the evening did not seem nearly so dark as we had thought when first peering out from the window of the refectory before making our final exit from the school. Our eyes, probably, became more accustomed to the half-light; but whether or no this was the case, we managed to get down to the harbour as comfortably as if going there in ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... within ten feet of that open clearing in the midst of the granite walls which we described on our first visit to the grotto of Ceyzeriat. Roland clung closely to the wall, and moved forward almost imperceptibly. In the dim half-light he looked ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... the chamber was in darkness. I saw a man with long hair, a full beard, wild-looking eyes, a pale face, framed in large whiskers,—as well as I could distinguish, and, as I think—red in colour. I did not know the face. That was, in brief, the chief sensation I received from that face in the dim half-light in which I saw it. I did not know it—or, at least, I ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... out, "I don't know. I don't know what you've been talking about. I don't know and I don't care." And then confronting her, their faces not a foot apart, for by now she had got to her feet, his hands gripped together and shaking, his teeth clenched, his eyes glowing there in the half-light of the auditorium, almost like an animal's, he demanded, "Can't you see what's the matter with me? Haven't you seen it ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... by the brisa, or north-east trade, the lord of these latitudes, had not a symptom of the Madeiran monotony of verdure. Behind us towered high the snowy Pilon (Sugar-loaf), whose every wave and fold were picked out by golden sunlight, azure half-light, and ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... "This half-light is so deceptive," she said, in a rather nervous voice; "I nearly steered you into the ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... plunge into the darkening mere at eventide, his great head and heavy shoulders ruddy in the rays of the sun. Here he hissed and roared and spluttered, sometimes frightening the eel-catcher sailing home in the half-light, and remembering suddenly school legends of river-sprites and monsters of ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Arcadian: both stuff for dreams. The one excogitated in spring-time, when Nature was taking her break-of-day drowse, previous to getting up and going about business; the other suggestive of Nature indulging in a half-light reverie in a sort of crimson and scarlet dressing-gown, previous to putting on her night-cap and going to bed, after a hard summer's work. The one reminding of a land where it is always afternoon of a day in the last of June, when ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... In the half-light below he paused again, and seemed to send his piercing glance into every bunk, from the forward to the after bulkhead. Finally, satisfied that no one else was in the fo'c's'le, he went to his own sleeping place, on the port ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... saw a half-light in Phyllis's room. Coming nearer I saw that she was standing at the window, with the same cloud on her face that had betrayed the battle with her conscience. At sight of her all the joyous emotion of my new tenderness overwhelmed me and I ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... still, Decros showing evident reluctance and restlessness the while, so strongly was his mind affected by all the stories he had heard about the pool. Moreover, it was rapidly growing dusk. In this half-light the funnel in which we were standing certainly did look a very diabolic and sinister hole. The fancy aiding, everything partook of the supernatural: the dark masses of brambles hanging from the rocks, the wild vines clinging to them with leaves like flakes ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... Editor sees himself journeying and struggling. Till lately a cheerful daystar of hope hung before him, in the expected Aid of Hofrath Heuschrecke; which daystar, however, melts now, not into the red of morning, but into a vague, gray half-light, uncertain whether dawn of day or dusk of utter darkness. For the last week, these so-called Biographical Documents are in his hand. By the kindness of a Scottish Hamburg Merchant, whose name, known to the whole mercantile world, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... now grown used to the half-light. Suddenly he saw what had lain beside him, keeping him warm all night. It was a great shaggy dog, brown and white. Around his neck was a heavy collar of leather studded with nails. Gigi did not like dogs. The only ones he knew had always chased the ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... half-past two in the morning, and a cold raw wind was whistling through the cordage and flinging the steamer's smoke down upon the decks and upon the water like a great veil of crepe. A sickly half-light was spread out between the sea and the heavens. By its means he could barely distinguish great, livid blotches of fog or cloud whirling across the black sky, and the unnumbered multitude of white-topped waves rushing ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... reserve about his visits. He knew well enough that people looked from their windows as he passed, and said, facetiously, "There goes Richard Alger to court Sylvy Crane." He preferred slipping past in a half-light, in which he did not seem so plain to himself, and could think himself less plain ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... shore beyond were both very flat in that part; nothing but marshy land, overgrown with tussock-grass, and a few sand-dunes, covered with bents. It was not a country which could give much cover to an enemy; but in that half-light one could not distinguish very clearly, and an enemy could therefore take risks impossible in ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... thoroughly intact that I could not but smile as I followed his swinging coat-tails to the sick-room. I carried no smile across the threshold of a darkened chamber which reeked of drugs and twinkled with medicine bottles, and in the middle of which a gaunt figure lay abed in the half-light. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... they reached the top. Even in the half-light it could be seen that their clothes were ill-fitting, frayed, and torn. They wore cast-off hats. The tall man, whose face was clean-cut and made a pretence of being smooth-shaven, had a pliable one; the other was ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure-silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the silence of that empty ocean, in that queer half-light between dawn and day, at six o'clock, silent as the settling of the dead to the bottomless bottom of the ocean, gray as fog, lonely, blind, soulless, voiceless, the ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... is one among my readers to whom the dim and dingy half-light of the theatre is dearer than the God-given radiance of the sunlight; if the burnt-out air with its indescribable odour, seemingly composed of several parts of cellar mould, a great many parts of ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... ought I to do? It looks foolish to go in.—Oh, bless you, Binkie!' The little terrier thrust Torpenhow's door open with his nose and came out to take possession of Dick's chair. The door swung wide unheeded, and Dick across the landing could see Bessie in the half-light making her little supplication to Torpenhow. She was kneeling by his side, and her hands were clasped ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... the red-tiled floor shone in the half-light. I crossed a neat little kitchen, just as a cuckoo-clock was chiming five, and found myself on the threshold of a small room opening on a garden. Rose was sitting in ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... more swamps and surface water. Time after time our ponies mired and had to be lifted out of the mud. Lush ferns and rank grass made walking dangerous. The trees were interlaced with draping festoons of gray "Spanish moss," forming a canopy overhead which let through only a gloomy half-light. No sounds broke the stillness except the half-awed calls of the men. No birds, not even a squirrel. Then it began ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... dark night. In the half-light Ben was able to see a considerable distance. The height of the opening from the ground was probably not much over twelve feet, as well as the boy could estimate. There would have been no difficulty in his getting out and swinging to the ground, but to this move there were two objections: ...
— The Young Explorer • Horatio Alger |
