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Fateful   Listen
adjective
Fateful  adj.  
1.
Having the power of serving or accomplishing fate. "The fateful steel."
2.
Significant of fate; ominous. "The fateful cawings of the crow."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fateful" Quotes from Famous Books



... On the fateful night the House was crowded. It seemed that all the guests at Lady Marchpane's a week before were in the Distinguished Strangers' Gallery or behind the Ladies' Grille. From the Press Gallery "Our Special Word-painter" looked down upon the statesmen beneath him, his eagle ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne

... the people of the United States have learned the lesson of the Lusitania, so far as an understanding of the issues at stake in this gigantic war is concerned, can they also get from it any guidance in regard to their own relation to the fateful struggle? Apparently, not yet. With practical unanimity the American people will henceforth heartily desire the success of the Allies, and the decisive defeat of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. With practical unanimity they ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... one knew exactly what had happened there, though it was obvious they, too, had received their share of the bombardment on that fateful night; but, while temperatures were found to be somewhat above normal, scientists were of the opinion that the deadly spawn that had fallen there had ...
— Spawn of the Comet • Harold Thompson Rich

... for a moment or two, as she asked herself whether she should tell this good friend of hers all that had happened on that fateful night; but she felt that she could not do so. The secret did not belong ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... feeling herself dismissed, hastened away to find her friend. She stood somewhat in awe of Colonel Campion, despite the fact that his young half-sister defied him continually with impunity. There was something fateful and forbidding about him. He made her think of a man labouring perpetually under a burden which he resented, but was compelled to bear. She wondered what he and Max Wyndham could have in common as she paused at the sea-window on the stairs to cool her cheeks. He had certainly been pleased in ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... of El Dorado," the following account is given of this aboriginal myth of an expected Indian Messiah, El Hombre Dorado, the Gilded Man, as the Spaniards interpreted the native words,—which played a fateful part in the history of the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... redness of blood as they crossed and recrossed that splendid path of light, and their hoarse cries filling the solemn air with clamour. The sight and sounds were strange, nor did the thickest-headed fellow crouched upon Crecy's fateful plain ever forget them ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard

... Naples—that fateful Marie Stuart of Provence—stood in her youth and beauty before her accusers, knowing she must buy her pardon, if for pardon she could hope. There the wretched Bishop of Cahors suffered tortures incredible for plots his enemies vowed he had conceived against the Pope. ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... careful toilet, he took his best horse and rode to a point overlooking the path by which the girls went for water. Here the young men were wont to take their stand, and, if fortunate, intercept the girl of their heart for a brief but fateful interview. Two Strike had determined to speak straight to the point, and as soon as he saw the pretty maid he came forward boldly and placed himself in her way. A long moment passed. She glanced up at him shyly ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... again got the better of my prudence, and Theodore was installed once more in the antechamber of my apartments in the Rue Daunou, and was, as heretofore, sharing with me all the good things that I could afford. So there he was on duty on that fateful first of April which was destined to be the turning-point of my destiny. And he showed M. de ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... it at the time, the tropics had fixed their strangely firm grip on me during that fateful first trip to the Far East which was destined to modify my whole subsequent life. I had firmly believed that if fortunate enough to get home I should have sense enough to stay there, but before six months had elapsed I was finding life at Ann Arbor, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... dream that fill'd her soul, Nor did not whisp'ring spirits roll A mystic tumult, and a fateful rhyme, Mix'd with wild ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... be that oak. Not an hour after she had first seen the fateful notice of "When the Honeymoon Wanes," Bertram's ring sounded ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... On that fateful afternoon, with no visitors present, Thuman opened the outside door, took Gunda by the left ear, and with his steel- shod elephant hook in his left hand started to lead the huge animal out ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... the dead line, and tried not to notice Lovin Child. He failed only because Lovin Child refused to be ignored, but insisted upon occupying the immediate foreground and in helping—much as he had helped Marie pack her suit case one fateful afternoon ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... Waterloo was won by the French in the middle of the day of that fateful battle, but a caprice of fortune—the arrival of Bulow's corps and Blucher's army, and the absence of Grouchy's corps—snatched from Napoleon's hands the triumph which was within his grasp. Wellington had even said to General ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman

... little windows had been spiked fast on the outside and Jack was at his wits' end to find by what means he might slip the fateful message to the captive seamen. He dared not climb upon the roof and seek for a crack in a hatchway. This would make ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... hints We'll show enough to rouse his watchful fears, Till the cold coward blaze a patriot. O Danton! murder'd friend! assist my counsels— Hover around me on sad memory's wings, And pour thy daring vengeance in my heart. Tallien! if but to-morrow's fateful sun Beholds the tyrant ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... shall keep my promise, though it breaks my heart to leave you like this. But I know—I feel that the parting will not be for long.... Yes....' as she slowly shook her head and a strange fateful look shadowed the feverish brightness of her eyes. 'I COULDN'T leave you if I didn't feel ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... and strange, and as he went by on his skis he was more like some powerful, fateful sigh than a man, his muscles elastic in a perfect, soaring trajectory, his body projected in pure flight, mindless, soulless, whirling along one perfect ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... eternal alternation of vigilance and repose: six wings grew from his shoulders, and spread fan-like around him. He was the incarnation of time, which destroys all things in its rapid flight; and of the summer sun, cruel and fateful, which eats up the green grass and parches the fields. An Astarte reigned with him over Byblos—Baalat-Gublu, his own sister; like him, the child of Earth and Heaven. In one of her aspects she was identified with the moon, the personification ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... reference to Coja Solomon's abduction, pending orders from the Nawab. Desmond's anxiety would have been largely increased had he known that Sirajuddaula, before his men had actually marched into the fort, had already started with the bulk of his forces on his fateful march to Calcutta. ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... warm evening when he came home on that fateful autumn day, Charlie had been pushed, in the course of years, right up to the edge, and was looking into the abyss, though he was hardly aware of it, so well had he been disciplined. He emerged from a third-class carriage of the usual train without an evening ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... the fateful day when Delphi's word was lost — Woe for the loveless prince of Aethra's line! Woe for a father's tears and the curse of a king's release — Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom! — And thou, the saddest wind That ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... I said, firmly, the vision of that fateful day at Fort Leavenworth coming back as I spoke—the vision of level green prairies, with gray rocks and misty mountain peaks beyond. And somewhere, between green prairies and misty peaks, a sweet child face with big dark eyes looking ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter

... anchors were let go, and in a few minutes held fast; then with a mighty cheer from the Deal men—lifeboatmen and lugger's crew all together—the Iron Crown half an hour afterwards was floated by the rising tide on the very top of the fateful sands; her hawser was brought to the waiting tug-boats, and she was towed—ship, cargo, and crew all saved—into the shelter ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... the thousand years had ended, the millennium would immediately begin. Therefore they did not reap neither did they sow, they toiled not, neither did they spin, and the appearance of the comet strengthened their convictions. The fateful year, however, passed by without anything remarkable taking place; but the neglect of husbandry brought great famine and pestilence over Europe in the ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage

... than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on the score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance, but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one. He saw that the cunning or functional side had been too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. "Let us suppose," he says, "that a grass growing in ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... something. And the plum-colored plush frame didn't sit very well on the vermilion wall paper. But Mrs. Cinnamon hung it over the sofa in the expectation of changing the paper some day. It stayed there until the fateful evening when Mr. Nelson Chur called on Miss Editha Cinnamon and was just warming up a proposal that had held over almost as long as the wall paper, when bang! down came the overhanging brass drawing and bent itself hopelessly on Mr. Chur's skull. Mr. Chur said something that may have ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes

... that fateful day, the splendid army of Newton was a thing for pity, for Dru had determined to exhaust the last drop of strength of his men to make the victory complete, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... in the end he put forth a hand not wholly steady and took the sheet held out to him. Monck stood beside him in utter immobility, gazing out over the valley with a changeless vigilance that had about it something fateful. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like everyone else—Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred her to Caponsacchi—not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment in which she resolved ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... clanged, and the sound seemed the only sound in all that wonderful June night. It had a fateful effect in the silence—like the tolling of a bell. Something echoed to it in his own heart, and he knew ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... and he could not accept defeat easily. However, in 1839, a colored girl was admitted to the school, and all his pupils were withdrawn, except the little negress and four whites, three of whom were his own daughters. So ended the Temple school. The event was very fateful for the Alcott family, but, much as it concerned Mrs. Alcott, there can be no doubt she much preferred that the school should end thus, than that Mr. Alcott should yield to public clamor on either of the issues which ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach

... takes us to Gilgal,—a fateful place for Saul, There they 'made Saul king before the Lord'; there he had taken the first step on his dark way of gloomy, proud self-will, down which he was destined to plunge so far and fatally. There he had, in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... had been passed, and the fateful loaf of cake had been cut, bringing the ring to Florence, and the thimble, fitting symbol of single blessedness, to Jean; and still there was time for a little more of the fun. Some one suggested a game of forfeits, and a pile of them was soon collected, to be held over the head ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray

... of mine, my little Son, alas! Beneath the sunlight of Thy gentle eyes, Too soon, too soon, what fateful shadows rise, Like night foretold in some sweet woodland glass? On tender feet that scarcely bow the grass, What stains are those of ripe pomegranate dyes?— When on my breast Thy head in slumber lies, What ...
— The Angel of Thought and Other Poems - Impressions from Old Masters • Ethel Allen Murphy

... on the higher plane of eroticism), but voluptuousness has immolated itself, has been annihilated in the love-death. The view that begetting and destroying are related functions, is based on the supposition that love is bound up with propagation. This is the fateful error of the modern theory of love, a rationalistic, metaphysical abstraction, which touches no corresponding chord in the human soul. To base the relationship of love and death on an association of becoming and declining is a beautiful idea, but nothing more. Modern synthetic ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... of all the strange, weird and remarkable incidents, this beats them all in its fateful significance. There is the little grave marked Amalie Canfield, died aged four years. Great ginger! here is a nameless Amalie who may have been older ...
— A Successful Shadow - A Detective's Successful Quest • Harlan Page Halsey

... that fateful determination has usually been made helplessly, ignorantly, almost unconsciously. It has either been guided by an instinct which, on the whole, has worked out fairly well, or controlled by economic interests of the results of which so much cannot be said, or left to the risks of lower than ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... true to his word. Five days before the expiration of the fateful month he went from Paris to Marseilles and embarked from there on one of the yachts belonging to the count for the little island of Monte-Cristo, which he reached on the appointed day. Ali, the black servant of the count, met him on the wharf ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... of that shock David Bright had probably never been entirely sane on the subject. The resurrection of Madame Danterre had seemed to him preternatural and fateful. The woman had become to him something more or something less than human, something impervious to attack that could not be dealt ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... speechless with astonishment; a moment of intense agony to Harold Mainwaring, as he watched whether her faith in him would waver. But she gave no sign, though she scanned his face, as the condemned criminal scans the document handed him as the fateful day approaches, to ascertain whether it contains his pardon or ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... fateful Power at Washington had set down a careless finger on a map of the U.S.A., and said to Kenset, "Here is your country," without knowledge or interest. Sometimes he wondered if there was another forest in the land as utterly lost as this, ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe

... that county there had for many years been an open doorway with no door, and through the open space the swallows had been wont, year after year, to fly to and fro on their hunting trips. Then came a fateful winter during which a new owner took it into his head to put up a fresh gate and to keep it locked, and, as ill luck would have it, he painted it blue, which, in the season of fine weather, probably heightened the illusion. ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... the size of the pages. He even made up one page himself to a blithe vocal accompaniment. When the busy composer and acting-manager hurried off to conduct a rehearsal, Raphael expressed his gratitude warmly. The hours flew; the paper evolved as by geologic stages. As the fateful day wore on, Gluck was scarcely visible for a moment. Raphael was left alone eating his heart out in the shop, and solacing himself with huge whiffs of smoke. At immense intervals Gluck appeared from behind the partition bearing a page or a galley slip. He ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... at last came the fateful Thursday, the climax of the panic. A pall seemed to have fallen upon Wall Street. Men ran here and there, bareheaded and pale with fright. Upon the floor of the Stock Exchange men held their breath. The market was falling to pieces. All sales had stopped; one might quote any price one chose, ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair

... more than one old friend among the thirty who took the field that day. There were those participating whose last game had been one of the spring "Internationals" in 1914, and who had been engaged in a prolonged and strenuous version of an even greater International ever since August of that fateful year. Every public school in Scotland was represented—sometimes three or four times over—and there were numerous doughty contributions from ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)

... fateful hour has the world known otherwise, for, although strange rumors floated down the great river to be whispered about from lip to lip, and New Orleans wondered many a long month whither had vanished the fair young wife, the daughter of Lafreniere, yet no authentic message ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... do you mean by these fateful prophecies? You fill me with terror. Why should a dream so gentle and sweet ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... make-believe at this season—we all of us, more or less, indulge in a make-believe about the New Year. As the clock strikes its twelve notes at midnight on December 31st, and all the bells of a great city are heard hovering in the air, sending forth their sweet sounds from far and near into the fateful night, there are few of us who have not a feeling that a great event has occurred. A physical change has set in—the Old Year is dead and gone, and the New Year, something tangible, which you can ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... end of an evening, the fairest, best dressed women depart one by one, leaving the ballroom deserted and empty. His bold hands trembled, his graceful limbs tottered, and then one night apoplexy turned its hooked and icy fingers around his throat. From this fateful day he became morose and harsh. He accused his wife and son of being insincere in their devotion, charging that their touching and gentle care was showered upon him so tenderly only because his money was all invested. Elvira and Philippe ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... gave another thought to Grossensteck until one morning, as I was sitting on the veranda of my boarding-house, the postman appeared and requested me to sign for a registered package. I opened it with some trepidation, for I had caught that fateful name written crosswise in the corner and began at once to apprehend the worst. I think I have as much assurance as any man, but it took all I had and more, too, when I unwrapped a gold medal the thickness and shape of an enormous checker, ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... for at last there came a letter addressed to "E. H.," with the name of a popular literary paper printed upon it. He clutched it with a hand that shook in his eagerness, and walked half a mile before finding a nook sufficiently secluded in which to open the fateful missive. There were moments as he hastened through the streets when the crumpled letter was like a live coal in his hand; again it seemed throbbing with life, and he held it tighter, as though it might escape. With a chill at ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... his temples and looked up at the coldly shining Isis Star, and through the silence there came to his soul in the speech that is never heard by the ears of flesh the fateful words: ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... tears and trouble. There had been sad news from the highlands of the Hudson. A troop of British had made their way almost to one of the camps, expecting to surprise and capture the Federal soldiers. There had been a sharp skirmish, spirited and fateful enough to be called a battle. The Federals had won in the end and taken a number of prisoners, while many British soldiers were ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... down. The moon was shining peacefully. How quickly those fateful hours of battle had passed! I started for the point where our line had formed, expecting to dispose of my prisoner there, and then sleep all night. As we passed along, the dead lay scattered here and there as they fell. There was something startlingly ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride

... seemed not in the studio alone, but in the world. Bedient fell into depths of thinking before it. A sudden turn for the worst in a well-established convalescence, held something of the same startling confrontation. There was no response to his willing it away. It was fateful, encompassing. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... shouts to his soldiers, "Draw!" 'Tis the enemy strikes the first, fateful blow! Our men break from line, for the battle-wine Of a fighting ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... you describe, and of horrors without number and name. To whatever crimes I have been urged since that interview, and the fit of madness that made you destroy my property, they spring from your act; they flowed from necessity, which, had you held your hand at that fateful moment, would never ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... to have a look at the view," he laughed back, and put the glasses to his eyes. First he examined the house, and then he turned his gaze in the direction of the sea. It was then that it dawned on me that he was looking for a yacht. This was the fateful hour, and it had naturally struck him that the unknown yacht might be in ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux

... most self-sacrificing and interesting of personalities. He came of good stock. His grandfather, John Parker, commanded the little company of minute-men who held the bridge at Lexington on that fateful nineteenth of April, 1775; his father a farmer, and Theodore himself the youngest of eleven children. The family was poor and the boy was brought up to hard labor, with short intervals of schooling now and then. But his thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable, and he read ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... way southward, she went to the inn at Belford where the riders carrying the mail usually put up for the night. Here, the same night, came the postman, and the seeming youth watched nervously, but determinedly, for an opportunity of finding out whether the fateful paper was in his bag or not. No slightest chance presented itself, however, and an attempt to obtain the mail-bag during the night failed by reason of the fact that the man slept upon it. One thing she did accomplish, which gave her hope that the encounter ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... the Signoria gave the bearer four ducats because the omen was good. Certain times and places were favourable or unfavorable, or even decisive one way or the other, for certain actions. The Florentines, so Varchi tells us, held Saturday to be the fateful day on which all important events, good as well as bad, commonly happened. Their prejudice against marching out to war through a particular street has been already mentioned. At Perugia one of the gates, the 'Porta Eburnea,' was thought lucky, and the Baglioni always went out ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... On that fateful Wednesday "Battista" sought out—as had now become his invariable custom—his compatriot as soon as the time of his noontide rest was come, the hour at which they dined at Condillac. He found Arsenio sunning himself in the outer courtyard, for it seemed that year that ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... the Countess that followed this fateful meeting—days of sweet communion of twin souls, hours of stolen bliss, when they could dwell apart in a region of high and ennobling thoughts, while the besotted husband was sleeping off the effects of his drunken orgies in the next room. To Alfieri, Louise was indeed ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall

... What it could all mean he did not yet understand, though some inklings of an explanation occasionally occurred to him. Oh, how he longed now for the Month of Birds to end, in order that he might pay his long-deferred visit to the mysterious Frenchman, from whose voice his Shadow had fled on that fateful evening with such sudden precipitancy. The Frenchman, he judged, must have been long on the island, and could probably give him some satisfactory solution of this ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... the provinces of the decrees of the Council of Trent and for the execution of the placards against heretics, while the proposals that had been made for an extension of the powers of the Council of State and for the summoning of the States-General were refused. As soon as these fateful decisions were known, and the Inquisition began to set about its fell work in real earnest, the popular indignation knew no bounds. A large number of the magistrates refused to take any part in the cruel persecution that arose, following the example of Orange, Egmont, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... to the extremely bad state of the trenches, till 9 a.m. The Battalion was disposed for the attack with X Company on the right, Y in the centre, Z on the left and W in support, with the 9th Battalion on the left flank and the 8th on the right. This fateful day, 5th November, proved to be the most disastrous the Battalion had yet passed through. The enemy position was exceptionally strong, the trenches from which the attack started were so muddy that several men were drowned in them, and the time for preparation was so short that the attack ...
— The Story of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry - France, April 1915-November 1918 • Unknown

... organized as a detachment under command of Colonel R.Y. Hayne."[3] It was his work on this occasion that gave Hayne that appeal to the public which was later to help him to pass on to the governorship and then to the United States Senate. On the fateful night twenty or thirty men from the outlying districts who had not been able to get word of the progress of events, came to the city in a small boat, but Vesey sent word to them to go back ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley

... understanding, should be able to solve that mystery with any completeness, is not even to be imagined. Nevertheless, we may claim that we have at least obtained a glimpse of the purpose of God in conferring upon the race this fateful power; for this and no other was the appointed means by which man was to ascend to his true place as a moral and spiritual being. If we can admit that purpose to be in harmony with the Divine benevolence, we may the more hopefully turn to other ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... is but forty miles across the Tongue of Ocean which divides the shores of New Providence and Andros, but you need to pick your weather for that, if you don't want to join the numerous craft that have vanished in that brief but fateful strip of water. However, the wind was liable to change any minute now, Charlie said, so he warned me to hold myself in readiness to jump ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... done. There is still the indirect, the tacit wooing. There's still opportunity. All through that fateful night from Gethsemane's gate, to the last word at Pilate's seat the Lover is wooing. But it is wooing by action, by presence, by yielding. No pleading word is spoken. The direct wooing is done. Tender, ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... and Homildon, and their impetuous valour could not avail against the English archers. They shared in the victory of Pathay, gained by the Maid of Orleans in June 1429, almost on the anniversary of Bannockburn, and they continued to follow the Maid through the last fateful months of her warfare. So great a part had Scotsmen taken in the French wars that, on the expiry of the truce in 1433, the English offered to restore not only Roxburgh but also Berwick to Scotland. But the French alliance was destined to endure for more than another ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait

... beseechingly or compellingly, and she sank down again. But she slowly shook her head at what he was saying, and turned her face toward him so that it gave her profile to the spectators. In that light and at that distance it was impossible to do more than fancy anything fateful in the words which she seemed to be uttering; but Westover chose to fancy this. Jeff waited a moment in apparent silence, after she had spoken. He sat erect and faced her, and this gave his profile, too. He must have spoken, for she shook her head again; and then, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... crucial, fateful hour, Her fine soul's test, 'gainst man's coarse power. In war, she can not be man's peer, But for home's weal, all men sincere Bow to ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation

... The sounds had ceased as though Alan had finished making ready and was waiting, perhaps sitting silent in the dark, perhaps lying down for an hour or two of sleep before the fateful hour of the high tide. Cicely heard her father, below, barring the door, putting out the candles, making ready for a night that would surely bring him no sleep. Presently he passed her door, glanced inside, and came in to ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... summer days flew past on wings of joy, bringing the fateful first of August that was to witness Dainty's bridal, as well as the twenty-sixth birthday of the handsome ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... sound in all the world," says A Sardou, "is the beating of the General." On that fateful Saturday afternoon in August, after nearly fifty years of silence through the length and breadth of France, there sounded again the ominous throbbing of the drums calling for the general mobilization of the nation. At its sound the French industrial army melted into a military one. Ploughshares ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... seeing so many dignitaries, turn cannon on them. "Disperse, IHR HERREN; have a care!" cried Friedrich; not himself much minding, so intent upon the Ziscaberg. And could have skipt indifferently over your cannon-balls ploughing the ground,—had not one fateful ball shattered out the life of poor Prince Wilhelm; a good young Cousin of his, shot down here at his hand. Doubtless a sharp moment for the King. Prince Margraf Wilhelm and a poor young page, there they lie dead; indifferent to the Ziscaberg and all coming wars of mankind. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... commodities of trade that usually it has been styled the Commercial Revolution. By the close of the sixteenth century it had proceeded far enough to indicate that its results would rank among the most fateful events ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... his head up out of the little cabin, groaned inwardly as he saw the mate step over the rail with the fateful bag and hand it to ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... effectively, and the strong and strenuous man who, with little encouragement from the government of his country, founded the British South Africa Company and acquired these territories for his countrymen, took one of the most fateful steps that statesman or conqueror has ever taken ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce

... nodded his head as if assenting, as he did not wish to spoil his brother's gladness at this moment by telling of the fateful letter across the face of which was written: "Moved to Canada. Present address unknown," nor of the many official letters he had in his trunk from the Governor of every Canadian Province and many other ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... by the distinguished politicians who volunteered to solve them; of the delegates' natural limitations and electioneering commitments and of the secret influences by which they were swayed; of the peoples' needs and expectations; of the unwonted procedure adopted by the Conference and of the fateful consequences of its decisions to ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... moment, then went. What difference did it make? Trix wouldn't be jealous now. What difference did anything make, for that matter? She was dull and low-spirited; she needed a walk in the fine fresh air. So they went on that fateful walk, that walk that was to be like no other in all ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... of Mahommed Gunga's, and a fateful one—more full of portent for the British Raj in India than he, or the British, or the men amid whose homes he rode could ever have anticipated. He averaged a little less than twenty miles a day, and through an Indian hot-weather, ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... misgivings, the fateful decision was reached by the "major parte," and preparations for departure were made. But where to go became a troublesome problem. The merits of Guiana and other "wild coasts" were debated, but finally Virginia ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews

... insignificant rise of ground crowned by trees, lying along the side of the road which ran by the gates of Dorlcote Mill. Insignificant I call it, because in height it was hardly more than a bank; but there may come moments when Nature makes a mere bank a means toward a fateful result; and that is why I ask you to imagine this high bank crowned with trees, making an uneven wall for some quarter of a mile along the left side of Dorlcote Mill and the pleasant fields behind it, bounded by the murmuring Ripple. Just where this line of bank sloped ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... Io, the languor of one who yields to unknown and fateful forces. Passive and at peace, she wanted nothing but to be wafted by the current to whatever far bourne might await her. That there should be such things as railway trains and man-made schedules in this world of winds and mystery and ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... muse mournfully over the agony and remorse that follow, and slowly close the volume upon tender forgiveness and final joy, they will be thankful for the far-seeing genius which, by this gradual process of education, enabled them to understand clearly the fateful scroll at last unfolded to them, and which, if they have read in the true spirit, has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various

... come to a morning into which many events of disastrous importance were crowded, the fateful September 9th. Before breakfast, an agitated girl, unknown at Harmony, arrived with the intelligence that Mr. Willem Botha had been arrested at 8 o'clock the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... practically promised a Constitution, and had ordered the troops from Berlin; he placed a sign on his castle "National Property." At this time the king let slip these fateful words, "Prussia is to be dissolved in Germany!" Bismarck, pained beyond expression, sent a letter to the King, full of expressions of loyalty. The King kept the letter on his ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... of considerable strength. His former strokes had not been made at the expense of exertion, but now he got ready for a supreme effort. A sudden silence clamped down upon the exuberant cowboys. It was one of those fateful moments when the air was charged with disaster. As Ed swung ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... that fateful 20th of July, the visible Armada with its swinging canvas was lying-to fifteen miles west of the invisible, bare-masted English fleet. Sidonia held a council of war, which, landsman-like, believed that the English were divided, one-half watching Parma, the other the Armada. ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood

... absolute silence, as the prisoners stood thus before the jury. The surrounding crowd forgot to breathe. It seemed, for a moment, as if the alcalde could not ask the fateful questions; but, at ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil

... tobacco, and having a hazy recollection of laying it on the ground the last time he filled his pipe, he shook his aching shoulders and trudged on. The loss of the tobacco decided him, and with a malediction on Alton he made for Horton's. It was also a fateful decision with far-reaching results he made just then. Supper had long been cleared away when he entered the general room of the hotel, and then stopped a moment with his hand on the door, for the one ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... face going red and pale by turns, and knew that his heart was beating with unaccustomed violence beneath his shabby vest. Professor Wheeler made his speech—and what a long one it seemed to many a lad!—and then the fateful list was ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour

... been storm mutterings within the awful cave of Old Grim Barnes had never before had a depressing effect upon her hero. He had always sallied forth with airy tread, humming a tune or laughing with his eyes. What could have happened at this fateful meeting? Perhaps he had been disinherited. Rapture of raptures, he had confessed his love for some howling beauty of humble station, had been cut off with the inevitable shilling and was now going forth to ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... the attention of the responsible leaders. The handful of French planes which in those early fateful days of August penetrated up into Belgium brought back the information of the German mobilization there, and this led to the rearrangement of French forces in preparation for the battle of the Marne. As a result aviation at once ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser

... one, he would soon hear her steps; indeed, he was hearing her steps now—he was sure of it. Those of Mrs. Yardley were quicker, shorter, more businesslike. These, now advancing through the corridor, lingered as if held back by dread or a fateful indecision. ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... roundhouse until nearly ten o'clock that fateful night, and then started for the hash-foundry, dodged into a lumber yard, got onto the rough ground back of town and made a wide detour toward Constitution Gulch, the Black Prince and the mule-sweep. I crept up to the washed ground through some brush and laid down in a path ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... carried off for his afternoon's outing. The half-hour or so in the drawing-room was over. Nelly was drawing on her gloves, standing by the window which over-looked the narrow slip of square, invisible now for the flowers on the balcony. The fateful visit was nearly at an end and Godfrey Langrishe's name had been ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... what had been happening in this country in those fateful years before the bombshell of ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale

... gives how arch and sly! The breath it wakes how fresh and grateful! Behind its shield how soft the sigh! The whispered tale of shame how fateful! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... terrace, and relate The charming tales that do with music mate. In August the Moravians have their fete, But it is radiant June in which Lusace Must consecrate her noble Margrave race. Thus in the weird and old ancestral tower For Mahaud now has come the fateful hour, The lonely supper which her state decrees. What matters this to flowers, and birds, and trees, And clouds and fountains? That the people may Still bear their yoke—have kings to rule alway? The water flows, the wind in ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawn up, and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this side of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature. The last time he had nearly lost the dinghy; he had beached the little boat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the act of stealing her, and sweeping her from the lagoon out to sea, when he returned laden ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who was a Roman Catholic, was looked upon with a certain amount of favour, but at the eleventh hour Napoleon III. made this scheme a pretext for the quarrel with Prussia which led to the fateful war of 1870 and 1871. Eventually, almost two years after the outbreak of the Revolution, Amadeo of Savoy was chosen by the Cortes at Madrid by a majority of one hundred and five votes, only twenty-three being given for Montpensier ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street

... fingers touched the key of the little instrument that was to send forth that fateful message, it was the unconscious touching of a secret spring which was to set in motion a succession of events of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... wolves in the surrounding wild-woods, the screaming of the catamounts in the near-by tree-tops, the sterile dog-star drying up the crops, the marching of my father to fight in the threatened Aroostook war, all conspired for months before this fateful night to awaken a restlessness, discontent, and gloomy forebodings in the lonely mother's heart which prenatal influences impressed upon the mind of the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... light, light!" she cries, "farewell; The coal-black horses wait for me. O shade of shades, where I must dwell, Demeter, mother, far from thee! Ah, fated doom that I fulfil! Ah, fateful flower beside the rill! The ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... each other, were both her lovers. At the end the hand of Hars, stiffened in death, clings to her robe, and brings her face to face with that death which the veritable Messalina was too cowardly to give to herself when her own mother pleaded with her to do so at the fateful meeting in ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... at Harper's Ferry the assistance given by Canada was small. Of the men who marched out with Brown on that fateful October night only one could in any way be described as a Canadian. This was Osborn Perry Anderson, a Negro born free in Pennsylvania. He was working as a printer in Chatham at the time of the convention and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... The fateful cards were put back into the drawer, the table shoved against the wall. The operation of undressing was quickly got over, the clothes they wore being put on top of their blankets. Uncle Billy yawned, "I wonder what kind of a dream I'll have tonight—it oughter be suthin' ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... after the despatch of this fateful letter, Baron Hulot arrived. Madame Marneffe threw her arms round the old ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... by his own vices, the blind leading the blind, fall to in a merciless conflict, mad and meaningless, born of a sad, unnecessary hate that shall terrorize the earth, unless God sends us another miracle of love like Christ or some vast chastening scourge of war, to turn aside the fateful blow." ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... Professor Andrew Fraser. The young Major's face was simply radiant, for Mattie Jones had just given him a letter and a nosegay, sent by the young heiress, who had already read a dozen times her lover's smuggled love missive of this fateful morning. ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... speech, which a day earlier would have passed unheeded, aroused all her instincts of defense. She was half-aware of the irony by which their talk about the nephews of Jack Holton had carried them with so fateful a directness to ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... usual—"gentlemen, what is the good of futile discussions? You wish for proofs? I propose that we try the experiment on ourselves: whether a man can of his own accord dispose of his life, or whether the fateful moment is appointed beforehand for each of us. ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... used only by the poorer folk. Over the rapids, where in after years trim Bell Weir lock will stand, they have been forced or dragged by their sturdy rowers, and now are crowding up as near as they dare come to the great covered barges, which lie in readiness to bear King John to where the fateful ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... the fateful week-end of August, 1914, when the destinies of Europe were decided in a few hours, have issues of such gravity engaged the attention of the British race...." Dreadful. I shall get some tennis tomorrow. I shan't be called. I shall get up when the sun is on my face and not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various

... of the dinner of three, Jasper, Landless, and Edwin. The chapter describing this fateful day (xiv.) is headed, When shall these Three meet again? and Mr. Proctor argues that Dickens intends that THEY SHALL meet again. The intention, and the hint, are much in Dickens's manner. Landless means to start, next day, very early, ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang

... an attentive poise of the head, she could not tell whether it was the beat of the swell or his fateful tread that seemed to fall cruelly upon her heart. Presently every sound grew fainter, as though she were slowly turning into stone. A fear of this awful silence came to her—worse than the fear of death. She called upon her ebbing strength for the ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad

... it down in her diary and prayed God to forgive her? Was not that enough? Why should this pressure to confess more be put upon her? Could it be that frivolous, selfish Roberta Vallis was the unconscious agent of some fateful power urging Penelope Wells to look into her ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... was that of the Allies' greatest need—the last months of the year 1914. On that fateful 4th August the British navy was concentrated in the North Sea, and the chance for a surprise attack by the German fleet, or an invasion of England by the Kaiser's armies, vanished for ever, and with this one chance went also ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife

... and the sunrise so early that there seemed to be no such thing as night. He had made up his mind to plead for a hearing in the hour of farewell; and it may have been as much from apprehension of that fateful hour as even from the delight of being in his mistress's company that he acceded with alacrity when Sir John desired him to stay. But an end must come at last to all hesitations, and a familiar verse repeated itself in his brain with the persistent ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... receive his answer. If he did not see her, if Seth did not return before long and he remained where he was, a prisoner and invisible, the last chance was gone. Ruth would believe he had repented of his declaration as embodied in the fateful note, and had fled from her. She had intimated that he was a coward in not seeing his fiancee and telling her the truth. She did not like his writing that other girl and running away. Now she would believe the cowardice was inherent, because he had written her, ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln

... tobacco and walked pensively back to the hotel. He was fond of Jno. Blake, and grieved for the trouble that had come upon him. It was odd, he felt, how things seemed to link themselves up together. The woman who had delivered the fateful lecture to injudicious eaters could not be other than the mother of his young guest of last night. An uncomfortable woman! Not content with starving her own family—Archie stopped in his tracks. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse

... tradition. And, thus, "Romanticism," which will hold its own despite its hostile critics, is their debtor. Their closeness to nature, their picturesque life in the past, their mythical religion, social system and fateful history have begot one of the wide world's "legends," an ideal not wholly imaginary, which, as a counterpoise to Realism, our literature needs, and probably ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... walked towards the house, again back, this time along a higher path, to look yet again across the front hedge to the fateful cottage opposite. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner

... ignoble, seemed to lift her not only above the ordinary weaknesses of her own sex, but made her superior to the men around her. Almost before she knew it, the operation was over, and she regarded with equal curiosity the ostentatious solicitude with which the doctor seemed to be wiping his fateful instrument that bore an odd resemblance to a silver-handled centre-bit. The stertorous breathing below the bandages had given way to a fainter but more natural respiration. There was a moment of suspense. The doctor's hand left the ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... for them to remain so near the scene of the struggle, and at daylight they were ready to start for the home of the Rev. Mr. Marrett in Woburn. Dorothy and Aunt Lydia were to remain in Lexington, and although they had kept well in the background through all the excitement of the fateful night, Aunt Lydia now went down to the door, not only to see the last of her beloved nephew, but to try to speak to some one who could give her more definite news of the seven hundred British soldiers who had arrived in town and were drawn up in formidable array against the motley company of ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... the afternoon. Perhaps it was the haunting tyranny of the defunct Hector; perhaps it was pique at being baffled, so far, in finding the culprit; whatever may have been the reason, he was in an ominously uncompromising mood when at last he returned to the fateful question. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed



Words linked to "Fateful" :   inevitable, calamitous, black, disastrous, foreboding, decisive, portentous



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