It could be some kind of trick Budd had thought up.

) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.

They, and the two large fans which I could dimly see as daylight filtered through their vents, down at the far end of the hall, could be turned on by a master switch situated inside the office.

Their roar, like the swelling volume of a hundred tornadoes could be heard for miles.

Atonement, if atonement were possible, could only be made at that sacred, sacrificial basin.

Bushes and vines abetted the rocks in forming thorny detours for the struggling stranger, and without the direct light of the sun to act as compass, Pamela could no longer be positive of her direction.

There was a peculiar density about it, a thick substance that could be sensed but never identified, never actually perceived.

And even with her limited knowledge of such things, she knew that the car could be repaired there ; ;

Not even an empty cartridge case could be found.

Inside the crown, stuffed behind the stained sweatband, could be seen thin, crumpled wads of currency.

How much of an accident could that be ''??

So far as he knew, only his father could be there.

A hell of an altitude for a barrel roll, but it could be done.

With the rapid rate of closure, the approach from below, the side, and ahead, there would be only a moment when damage could be done.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

The entire length of the street could be raked with rifle fire from this barn.

When he awoke in the mornings, she was in his mind and he could hardly wait to get to school to be near her in the flesh.

It is hard to see how the situation could be otherwise.

Each could be the real thing.

Officers who participate in the continual practice drills assured me that the President's decision could be made and announced on the gold circuit within minutes after the first flash from Aj.

Seeking an obscure, dark, relatively quiet corner in the airy room otherwise suffused with afternoon sunshine, he asked if the soft background music could be turned off.

Faulkner culminates the Southern legend perhaps more masterfully than it has ever been, or could ever be, done.

The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.

Zhang fantasized about her in his " Rhapsody on Contemplating the Mystery " ( 思玄賦 ), yet the pleasures of the flesh and immortality that she could offer were not tempting enough to sway his heart which was set elsewhere.

The bold player who was lucky and adventurous, and could push on his couch with a considerable stake to sept-et-le-va, quinze-et-le-va, trente-et-le-va, etc., must in a wonderful manner have multiplied his couch, or first stake ; but this was seldom done ; and the loss of the players, by the very nature of the game, invariably exceeded that of the bank ; in fact, this game was altogether in favour of the bank ; and yet it is evident that, in spite of this obvious conviction, the game must have been one of the most tempting and fascinating that was ever invented.

For example, the double agent could be offered some tempting " bait " e. g. be told that important information was stored at a dead drop site.

As the practice of marking to market caught on in corporations and banks, some of them seem to have discovered that this was a tempting way to commit accounting fraud, especially when the market price could not be objectively determined ( because there was no real day-to-day market available or the asset value was derived from other traded commodities, such as crude oil futures ), so assets were being ' marked to model ' in a hypothetical or synthetic manner using estimated valuations derived from financial modeling, and sometimes marked in a manipulative way to achieve spurious valuations.

Some player classes were designed to do more damage than others and could find it quite tempting to " help " other players kill monsters.

The possibility existed, they believed, that SAC could in fact deliver a " decisive " attack on the USSR, a tempting idea given the power of the 15-megaton hydrogen bombs being tested.

For example, in the arithmetic grammar above, it would be tempting to move some rules around so that the precedence order of products and sums could be expressed in one line:

In several scenes, Mr. Burns is portrayed as the Devil who is tempting Homer and showing him what he could have.

An Enlistment Act saw a change in the terms of enlistment, which could at last produce some trained reserves and also made soldiering a more tempting career.

These latter must have been in the valley of the Bybrook and it is tempting to think that Hazelbury, which could have covered Box Hill, also included Box, which is not mentioned at Domesday, but the area of land given for Hazelbury is insufficient for this.

However, Way then discovered that he could not escape from his recording contract with Chrysalis Records, and then received a tempting offer to play for Ozzy Osbourne, so abandoned the project.

Another view popular for a time ( for example, see Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov ) was that the devil wasn't so much tempting Jesus as presenting him with the different options he could take to be a Messiah, and making him choose one.

And he could no longer think of face-saving, of honor, but only of escape.

`` No, I remembered reading about you in the papers and that you lived here, and when it happened all I could think of was '' -- This time she stopped the rush of words herself.

If you tell him I made a pass at you he might think you misunderstood something I said or did, so instead of just telling him I made a pass, say I tried to date you and that you agreed so you could prove to him what a louse I really am.

Then he would realize they were really things that only he himself could think.

`` Why '', he went on, `` when Rob asked me if he could make his dive on this trip, I didn't think twice about it.

He could think of nothing else save his mental image of her nude figure and what Charles had said that morning about Margaret Rider.

I was far from convinced of the truth of my statement, but could not think of anything that might evoke responses more quickly.

`` I think by the end of next week he could get out in the air a little.

I think you could have heard him a mile away, and he was bursting at every seam with importance.

He could think of nothing else to tell them: no assurances, no hopeful hints at great discoveries that day.

`` Do you think he could be having an affair ''??

`` Nothing's free in the whole goddam world '', was all I could think of to say.

Lovingly, she accepted, and so great was my emotion that all I could think of saying was, `` You're amazing, you know ''??

More than once I was confronted by professional gamblers, `` bookies '', loan `` sharks '', gangsters, `` thugs '' and `` finger men '' -- people of a class I did not even know existed -- to repay my husband's staggering losses, `` or else '' I shuddered to think that someone so dear to me could even associate with such a sinister milieu.

`` If I could only think of something at the studio, near me, to absorb his boundless energy '', I said.

All they could think of was to run around in circles, kicking their legs out.

I think all this could apply to Parker just as well, although, because of the nature of music, it is not demonstrable -- at least not conclusively.

They suggested several new foods, and usually I found them good, except the sweets, which I think I could learn to like.

as long as she could do nothing constructive about the situation she was in, she would think about something else.

They were both breathing heavily, out cold, and Shayne didn't think either of them had recognized him or could describe him.

He could think of no answer.

By the time Felix turned up it was early afternoon, which, one would think, would be late enough so that by then, except for small children and a few hardy souls who had not yet sobered up, it could have been expected that people would no longer be having any sort of active interest in the previous night's noisemakers and paper hats.

At this moment, all he could think of was what he'd been forced to undergo.

What did she think he could do??

To begin the interview, he asked if Thayer, with more time to think it over, could add to what he had said the other day about Johnston.