General Books

Chapter One. “I wish I wasn’t such a fool!” Tom Blount said this to himself as he balanced that self upon a high stool at a desk in his uncle’s office in Gray’s Inn. There was a big book lying open, one which he had to study, but it did not interest him; and though he tried very hard to keep his attention fixed upon its learned words, invaluable to one who would some day bloom into a family... more...

A GRAPEFRUIT PRELUDE. Splash! The grapefruit hit her in the eye! Splash! His psychic wave was dashed to smithereens! “Oh! Oh!” the two girls screamed in unison. “D–––!” the young man sitting near ejaculated. For ten minutes there in the Oak Room of the Ritz-Carlton he had been hurling across the narrow intervening space this mental command to the girl facing him: “Look here! Look at me!... more...

CHAPTER I Michael Arranstoun folded a letter which he had been reading for the seventh time, with a vicious intentness, and then jumping up from the big leather chair in which he had been buried, he said aloud, "Damn!" When a young, rich and good-looking man says that particular word aloud with a fearful grind of the teeth, one may know that he is in the very devil of a temper! Michael... more...

THE FLY ON THE WHEEL The offices of the Governor and the Lieutenant-Governor adjoined. Each had its ante-room, in which a private secretary wrote eternally at a roll-top desk, an excessively plain-featured stenographer rattled the keys of his typewriter, and a smug-faced page yawned over a newspaper, or scanned the cards of visitors with the air of an official censor. At intervals, an electric bell... more...

CHAPTER I But Michael never sailed out of Tulagi, nigger-chaser on the Eugénie.  Once in five weeks the steamer Makambo made Tulagi its port of call on the way from New Guinea and the Shortlands to Australia.  And on the night of her belated arrival Captain Kellar forgot Michael on the beach.  In itself, this was nothing, for, at midnight, Captain Kellar was back on the beach, himself climbing the... more...

PROLOGUE OF THE CIGAR DIVAN In the city of encounters, the Bagdad of the West, and, to be more precise, on the broad northern pavement of Leicester Square, two young men of five- or six-and-twenty met after years of separation.  The first, who was of a very smooth address and clothed in the best fashion, hesitated to recognise the pinched and shabby air of his companion. ‘What!’ he cried,... more...

LUIS AGUIRRE had been living in Gibraltar for about a month. He had arrived with the intention of sailing at once upon a vessel bound for Oceanica, where he was to assume his post as a consul to Australia. It was the first important voyage of his diplomatic career. Up to that time he had served in Madrid, in the offices of the Ministry, or in various consulates of southern France, elegant summery... more...

It was a calm and hazy morning of Southern summer that on which I turned my face seaward from the "keep" of Beauseincourt, never, I knew, to see its time-stained walls again, save through the mirage of memory. There is an awe almost as solemn to me in a consciousness like this as that which attends the death-bed parting, and my straining eye takes in its last look of a familiar scene as it... more...

Barry Raymond drew the latchkey out of the door and entered his small flat in Kensington just as the clock in the tiny hall chimed the hour of ten. It was a wet night; and he drew off his Burberry and hung it up with a sense of pleasure in being again in his cosy little eyrie at the top of the chilly stone steps. Humming a tune, he crossed the diminutive hall and went into the sitting-room, where the... more...

CHAPTER I. A GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION. George L—— to Paul B., Paris Rozel, 15th September. It's nine o'clock in the evening, my dear friend, and you have just arrived from Germany. They hand you my letter, the post-mark of which informs you at once that I am absent from Paris. You indulge in a gesture of annoyance, and call me a vagabond. Nevertheless, you settle down in your best arm-chair,... more...