Austria looked on with distrust and dismay, and tried to pick a quarrel and thus find a pretext for invasion by ordering its troops, who had as yet only garrisoned the fortress, to occupy the city of Ferrara and patrol its streetsa measure almost sure to lead to a collision with its citizens.

A peace was made in 1376, but a new though fruitless attempt of the Slavonic peoples against him gave Amurath a pretext for further assault upon southeastern Europe.

Except that I could trust her completely, there was no distinction of age, social rank, or domestic relation to afford a pretext for exempting her from restraints which, if at first I thought them senseless and severe, were soon justified by experience of the kind of domestic control which just emancipated school-girls expected and required.

It was Christmas time, and the atmosphere furnished some pretext for asthmatic affections.

Even among those who blamed and feared the agitation out-of-doors, several believed in the urgent necessity of a concession to remove all pretext for clamors and intrigues.

During my third year at that place, in one of my excursions to Philadelphia, and for which I was always inventing pretexts, I became acquainted with one of those faces and forms which, in a youth of twenty, to see, admire, and love, is one and the same thing.

Kookoo, intensely curious, sought some pretext for staying, but found none.

He nevertheless offered the pretext that he wished to please their god Serapis, Alexander their founder, and, third, Areus a citizen, who was a philosopher and enjoyed his society.

And when you have done it,' said Mazzuolo, 'give me a wink, and I will step out and see that all is right before she goes to her room.' Karl obeyed his directions to a tittle, and when all was ready, he gave the signal, and Mazzuolo, making a pretext, quitted the table.

W., at any rate, would do no more, and it was evident that the Chamber would seize the first pretext to overthrow the ministry.

This irritated Camus, but secretly pleased him for he needed a pretext constantly renewed to think the world bad, and men a set of imbeciles.

And this, together with the often-renewed complaint that the stipulations of the treaties of 1778 had not been observed and executed by the United States, formed the pretext for the series of outrages upon our Government and its citizens which finally drove us to seek redress and safety by an appeal to force.

Notwithstanding Miss Vernon had charged Rashleigh with perfidious conduct towards herself, they had several private interviews together, though their bearing did not seem cordial; and he and I took up distant ground, each disposed to avoid all pretext for collision.

The murder provided an admirable pretext for aggression against Serbia, and at the same time tended to revive all the latent prejudice with which the country of the regicides was still regarded in the West.

Any other woman, with exalted notions fed upon French novels, might have acted thus; or one who wanted only a pretext to throw herself into a lover's arms.

Hence in their public proclamations they always alleged some pretext or otherall of them equally groundless.

Why? Because it is his rightbecause he has shown himself fit for itbecause a pretext or a shadow of a pretext can no longer be devised for withholding that right from its possessor.

Can human wit imagine a more ridiculous pretext than this, of affecting to hold the balance even, when you are preventing the conqueror from improving his victory, and only preventing the vanquished from attempting what without a miracle he cannot do, cannot, even with all your assistance, venture to try?

Lady Romford has a private box, which she visits only in preference to staying at a still duller home, on a disengaged evening; and Bagot occasionally drags me to the play, to make my foreign ignorance and inexperience a pretext for following Lady Clara to a spot which no one seems to visit without an apology.

It is, for example, in vain to ask a light or any fire from the houses of the Albanians after sunset, if the husband or head of the family be still afield; a custom in which there is more of police regulation than of superstition, as it interdicts a plausible pretext for entering the cottages in the obscurity of twilight, when the women are defenceless by the absence of the men.

What rendered her resolution more impressive was the ingenuous manner with which she never hesitated to admit Raoul's power over her affections, leaving no pretext for the commonplace supposition that the girl was acting.

I can well believe, messire, that you love your pretext for theft and murder.

The king, having now obtained a pretext so much more plausible for his violence, would probably have pushed the affair to the utmost extremity against him; but Becket gave him no leisure to conduct the prosecution.

The two sovereigns sought for combinations which would allow them to make, one to the other, the desired concessions, whilst still preserving pretexts for and chances of recovering them.

The government, in charging itself with his obsequies and declaring that his funeral should be celebrated at the cost of the State, may have been taking a wise precaution to prevent all pretext for disturbance; but it responded also to a public and popular sentiment.