{"product_id":"2940012365828","title":"AN AMERICAN WOMAN","description":"Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure. (Worth every penny!) *** CHAPTER I. AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS -- IT was the hour of sundown after a day of tropical heat. The sky, unrelieved by one soft touch of cloud, seemed like a burnished canopy overhanging the parched and drooping earth. For weeks the inhabitants of Boonville, Missouri, had longed for rain to refresh their parched fields and to wash clean the streets of their little town. The wooden houses in the suburbs, cracked and blistered by the sun, had lost the bright, fresh look which their spring coat of paint had given them. The meadows were brown and parched, and already, although it was but the last week in August, the trees were taking on the gorgeous hues of autumn. Boonville was a flourishing town in the centre of a great wheat-growing district. Some of the earlier settlers told marvellous tales of their pioneering days, when the virgin soil responded to the husbandman's touch with a miracle of growth. These days, however, were past, and people lived sober, common-place lives in Boonville as elsewhere. Fortunes were no longer lost and won at a bound, and some of the old stories were rather discredited by the younger generation, who found the tide of life in Boonville roll by sluggishly, and who longed for some of the excitement of which they sometimes heard. Boonville was a slow-going, peace-loving, and law-abiding place, and the community was a religious community. Indeed, the number of religious sects and meeting-houses was out of all proportion to the number of the inhabitants. There was a considerable German element in the town, which helped to solidify it and keep down lawlessness and disorder, for the Teuton everywhere makes a good settler, and sets a good example of sobriety and thrift and perseverance to all other nationalities. He is not enterprising, however, and we seldom find him among the pioneers of great causes, or among the heroes of great achievements. In Boonville there existed one fortune undreamed of by those who knew the man who had made it, and it is with this fortune and its spending that we have to do. In one of the outlying suburbs of the little town, in a quiet, unpretentious line of suburban houses, each standing in its pleasant garden, the road sheltered on either side by a stately row of trees, which in summer lent a grateful shade and always made a picturesque outline, there stood an unpretentious two-storey, wooden house with a verandah running along the front and two sides. There was nothing about this house to distinguish it from the others in the avenue. It was unpretentious and homely without, the little lawn before the door was well kept, and the hanging baskets of flowers were in brilliant contrast to the more sober hue of the creeper with which the verandah was entirely covered. These baskets were carefully arranged to give the best effect, and seemed to indicate a separate and individual taste in some member of the household. In one respect the exterior of this house differed somewhat from the others, and that was in the drapery of the windows, which was very English in style, curtains of Nottingham lace falling in straight lines from ceiling to floor instead of being fantastically draped like the windows of its neighbours. In one of the upper chambers of this house on that hot and breathless August evening an elderly man sat propped up among his pillows, a poor, wasted shadow standing on the brink of the River of Death. The seal of the last enemy was stamped upon his sharpened features. His eyes had that hollow brilliance and his complexion that clayey look inseparable from approaching dissolution. He was a very uncouth figure, very tall evidently, and of massive build. He had a strong and, in some respects, a striking face—a high, intelligent forehead and a massive jaw—which betokened some intellectual power and immense strength of will. His hair was grey and straggling, as was the beard of some week's growth, which gave him a somewhat wild and unkempt look. A small writing-board was laid across his knees; upon this board were several papers, which he fingered nervously, trying to fix upon them the attention which already wandered far beyond his control. He was not alone in the room. Close by his bed sat his daughter, a young woman of four and twenty, tall and handsome, and as striking in her way as her father. She was like him, and yet unlike. She had the same strength and power in her features, and yet they were softened by an indescribable and winning sweetness which she had never inherited from him. The exact and fastidious neatness of her dress, notwithstanding its studied simplicity, was no incorrect index of the character of Lois Mortimer Penn. She loved her father dearly...","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47145329000688,"sku":"2940012365828","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012365828_p0.jpg?v=1763568041","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012365828","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}