General Books

HUSBAND AND WIFE. It was a brilliant day in June. The sky was cloudless and dazzlingly blue, but the heat of the sun's rays was tempered by a deliciously cool breeze, and the foliage of the trees that clothe the pleasant slopes round the vivacious little town of Aix-les-Bains afforded plenty of shade to the pedestrian. Aix was, as usual, very crowded and very gay. German potentates abounded:... more...

CHAPTER I. Mrs. Geraldine Jerrold, of Boston, had in her girlhood been Miss Geraldine Grey, of Allington, one of those quiet, pretty little towns which so thickly dot the hills and valleys Of New England. Her father, who died before her marriage, had been a sea-captain, and a man of great wealth, and was looked upon as a kind of autocrat, whose opinion was a law and whose friendship was an honor. When... more...

THE WALRAVEN BALL. A dark November afternoon—wet, and windy, and wild. The New York streets were at their worst—sloppy, slippery, and sodden; the sky lowering over those murky streets one uniform pall of inky gloom. A bad, desolate, blood-chilling November afternoon. And yet Mrs. Walraven's ball was to come off to-night, and it was rather hard upon Mrs. Walraven that the elements should make a... more...

CHAPTER I. THE LONE PASSENGER That evening the down train from London deposited at the little country station of Ramsdon but a single passenger, a man of middle height, shabbily dressed, with broad shoulders and long arms and a most unusual breadth and depth of chest. Of his face one could see little, for it was covered by a thick growth of dark curly hair, beard, moustache and whiskers, all overgrown... more...

A POOR MAN'S TALE OF A PATENT I AM not used to writing for print. What working-man, that never labours less (some Mondays, and Christmas Time and Easter Time excepted) than twelve or fourteen hours a day, is? But I have been asked to put down, plain, what I have got to say; and so I take pen-and-ink, and do it to the best of my power, hoping defects will find excuse. I was born nigh London, but... more...

CHAPTER I What determined the speech that startled him in the course of their encounter scarcely matters, being probably but some words spoken by himself quite without intention—spoken as they lingered and slowly moved together after their renewal of acquaintance.  He had been conveyed by friends an hour or two before to the house at which she was staying; the party of visitors at the... more...

Part 1 One Wednesday afternoon in late September, Ann Veronica Stanley came down from London in a state of solemn excitement and quite resolved to have things out with her father that very evening. She had trembled on the verge of such a resolution before, but this time quite definitely she made it. A crisis had been reached, and she was almost glad it had been reached. She made up her mind in the... more...

THE DUMB CHILD. It was about the close of the year 1876 when, on my road to Paris, I boarded the St. Gothard railway-train. Travellers coming from Italy had already taken possession of the sleeping-car compartments, and I owed it solely to the virtue of an extraordinarily large tip that I was at last able to stretch my weary limbs upon the little sofa of a half-coupé. It was not a very comfortable... more...

During fourteen years Hepworth Closs had been a wanderer over the earth. When he was carried out from the court-room after Mrs. Yates' confession of a crime which he had shrinkingly believed committed by another, he had fainted from the suddenness with which a terrible load had been lifted from his soul. In that old woman's guilt he had no share. It swept the blackness from the marriage he... more...

CHAPTER I. Miss Kimpsey dropped into an arm-chair in Mrs. Leslie Bell's drawing-room and crossed her small dusty feet before her while she waited for Mrs. Leslie Bell. Sitting there, thinking a little of how tired she was and a great deal of what she had come to say, Miss Kimpsey enjoyed a sense of consideration that came through the ceiling with the muffled sound of rapid footsteps in the chamber... more...