Romance Books

MARTHA   In the long run all love is paid by love,    Tho' undervalued by the hosts of earth.  The great eternal government above    Keeps strict account, and will redeem its worth.  Give thy love freely; do not count the cost;    So beautiful a thing was never lost          In the long run. ——Ella Wheeler Wilcox. THOMAS PERKINS was astonished beyond words. Martha... more...

THE OLD MAN One afternoon in the late autumn a well-dressed old man was walking slowly down the street. He appeared to be returning home from a walk, for his buckle-shoes, which followed a fashion long since out of date, were covered with dust. Under his arm he carried a long, gold-headed cane; his dark eyes, in which the whole of his long-lost youth seemed to have centred, and which contrasted... more...

CHAPTER I. ~ IN WHICH WE HOLD COUNSEL. It was a nondescript sort of a room, taking it altogether. A big, sunny room, whose once handsome papering and corniceing had grown dingy, and whose rich carpeting had lost its color and pile in places, and yet asserted its superiority to its surroundings with an air of lost grandeur in every shabby medallion. There were pictures in abundance on the walls, and... more...

CHAPTER I t was Springtime in Switzerland! Once more the snow-capped mountains mirrored their proud heads in sapphire lakes; and on the beeches by the banks of Lake Lucerne green buds were bursting into leaves. Everywhere were bright signs of the earth's awakening. Springtime in Switzerland! And that, you know—you young hearts to whom the gods are kind—is only another way of saying Paradise!... more...

I She sat at the base of the big tree—her little sunbonnet pushed back, her arms locked about her knees, her bare feet gathered under her crimson gown and her deep eyes fixed on the smoke in the valley below. Her breath was still coming fast between her parted lips. There were tiny drops along the roots of her shining hair, for the climb had been steep, and now the shadow of disappointment darkened... more...

SOUNDS FROM A DISTANT "C." -… — .-… -. Just a noise, that is all. But a very significant noise to Miss Nathalie Rogers, or Nattie, as she was usually abbreviated; a noise that caused her to lay aside her book, and jump up hastily, exclaiming, with a gesture of impatience:— "Somebody always 'calls' me in the middle of every entertaining chapter!" For that noise, that... more...

GRETCHEN IN THE LIBRARY In winter the interior of the university library was hardly warmer than the outside, and it was terribly drafty. The sole difference between the interior and exterior, Gretchen often remarked to herself, was that the latter received an occasional snow. The library at least was dry. On most days in the unfrequented areas—the closed stacks on the second and third floors—one... more...

PREPARING FOR A JOURNEY. A heavy curtain of yellow fog rolled and drifted over the waste of beach, and rolled and drifted over the sea, and beneath the curtain the tide was coming in at Downport, and two pair of eyes were watching it. Both pair of eyes watched it from the same place, namely, from the shabby sitting-room of the shabby residence of David North, Esq., lawyer, and both watched it without... more...

It was now almost too dark to distinguish objects; duskier and vaguer became the flat world of marshes, set here and there with cypress and bounded only by far horizons; and at last land and water disappeared behind the gathered curtains of the night. There was no sound from the waste except the wind among the withered reeds and the furrowing splash of wheel and hoof over the submerged causeway. The... more...

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