Paragraph: (Fiction-stories-masc-The_Black_Willow-0.txt)
Sent 1: Allan sat down at his desk and pulled the chair in close.
Sent 2: Opening a side drawer, he took out a piece of paper and his inkpot.
Sent 3: After filling his pen, Allan looked at his paper in the orange glow from the lantern set back in the desk's right-hand corner.
Sent 4: His pen cast a forbidding line of shadow slanting across the page, echoing the inky darkness crouching in the edges of the lantern's struggling glow.
Sent 5: The only other illumination came from a lurid moonlight filtered through thin branches and clouds, casting its bone-pale glow onto the pine floorboards.
Sent 6: Allan unfolded another page, this one crowded with ranks of letters in tight formation from left to right.
Sent 7: The lines of letters stepped into their divisions, in the shape of a story's outline: the loose, dry skeleton of a tale lay exposed beneath their feet, awaiting tendons, muscle and blushing skin.
Sent 8: Allan reviewed the troops, all prepared to disembark, their task to form the tale of a young man returning home from Life Abroad to find his childhood friend a bride to-be, thus upsetting the apple cart of his life's plan, clarified – of course – by his very time away from her he loved best.
Sent 9: Although the concept was a simple one, Allan thought it had potential.
Sent 10: Besides, the public liked a good, simple romance.
Sent 11: Perhaps this will be more saleable, he thought and began to write.
Sent 12: They gazed at each other, lost in the rapture of love based so deeply within their hearts that they had never seen it before.
Sent 13: "What about Roger?"
Sent 14: she asked, knowing that the answer no longer mattered.