Poor Douglas , before his deathdeath-- when it was in sight -- committedcommitto me the manuscript that reachedreachhim on the third of these days and that , on the same spot , with immense effecteffect, he began to readreadto our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth .
Their attitude remained , none the less , that of not forsaking the board ; and the effecteffectof this in turn was to give them the appearance of having accepted each other with an absence of preliminaries practically complete .
It was so artistically done , and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy , that it had all the effecteffectof a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore , and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age , but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony .
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying , smokingsmoke, as was his custom , innumerable cigarettes , Lord Henry Wotton could just catchcatchthe gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum , whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs ; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flittedflitacross the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window , producing a kind of momentary Japanese effecteffect, and making him thinkthinkof those pallid , jade-faced painters of Tokyo who , through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile , seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion .