What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion with a door-plate for a
waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish?
It could never be the same, of course, but yet, day by day, she found her mother-love, enveloping the waif more closely until she sometimes sat with closed eyes lost in the sweet imagining that the little bundle of humanity at her breast was truly her own.
Her heart, bereft of its own, had gone out to this poor, little, nameless waif, and lavished upon it all the love that had been denied her during the long, bitter weeks of her captivity aboard the Kincaid.
"This is Meriem, my dear," he said, and he told the story of the jungle
waif in so far as he knew it.
Stryver (after notifying to his jackal that "he had thought better of that marrying matter") had carried his delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the City streets had some
waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney's feet still trod those stones.
It was Aunt Polly, too, who discovered the story one day about the two poor little
waifs in a snow-storm who found a blown-down door to crawl under, and who wondered what poor folks did that didn't have any door!
The towers and steeples of the many house- encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun-dial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy
waifs and strays of housekeepers and porter sweep melancholy
waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy
waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell.
Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began to steal upon the eyelids of the little
waifs. The pipe dropped from the fingers of the Red-Handed, and he slept the sleep of the conscience-free and the weary.
A tide of
waifs, strays, and malcontents of old camps along the river began to set towards Devil's Ford, in very much the same fashion as the debris, drift, and alluvium had been carried down in bygone days and cast upon its banks.
Faye Marsay, above left, appearing as The
Waif in Game of Thrones, above
Wouldn't it be easier to just tell the
Waif to let her go?