Tony Walker

So leisurely does the process of decay take its way with them.

She was very tall and cylindrical in shape, an almost epicene, sexless body.

She was invariably dressed in an iridescent grey garment of antique cut and rustling train.

About her face, her nose in particular, the rector had made one of his rare jests by adapting it to a Max Beerbohm pleasantry.

Hints of the Iron Duke at most angles.

And indeed, that ungainly, craggy feature dominated the rest.

Her mouth was small, thin-lipped, dry.

Her eyes were quite round, monkey's eyes, and an odd brimstone yellow, a family stigma.

Her hair was a dense grey mass.

The face was a mask, as though modelled in wax from a corpse, quite colourless.

Her age might have been anything from fifty-five to seventy.

Amelia was about forty-eight.

Once upon a time, she might have been a bonny girl, for her features were well enough, but it required a sympathetic and perceptive eye so to scan and reconstruct the past.

There are parasites which slowly devour and drain their hosts from within, till nothing is left but a thin, transparent envelope, a puff of wind, and it disintegrates.

Amelia might have been long entertaining some such greedy guest, pounds underweight, gaunt and stooping, listless and lifeless of hair and eye, like a prisoner at long last delivered from a dungeon where she had lain neglected and forgotten.

death had his hand on her shoulder and was fast tightening his grip but to give her her due it had taken nine years to bring her to this pass i'll go and cook the luncheon she said yes what is the chops

i'll have three are you hungry no miss pendleham then cook four and let mine be read right through carthwaite place rose on the northern slopes above lake windermere it was unmistakably elizabethan a huge sombre pile of brick with a multitude of mullioned transomed windows and a flat roof

it had thirty-five bedrooms and one bathroom it required many thousands spent on it to make it habitable but that money would never be found and it was very slowly breaking up and passing the grounds surrounding it had gone back to a wild disorderly nature

Miss Pendleham never left it, save to attend matins on Sunday morning.

Its one trace of modernity was a telephone, used for ordering her frugal wants from the market town six miles away.