Romance Books

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...

CHAPTER I Grim Fate was tender, contemplating you,And fairies brought their offerings at your birth; You take the rose-leaf pathway as your due,Your rightful meed the choicest gifts of earth. —Arthur C. Legge. Fay stood on her balcony, and looked over the ilexes of her villa at Frascati; out across the grey-green of the Campagna to the little compressed city which goes by the great name of Rome. How... more...

CHAPTER I THE SCARLETT WITCH DEPARTS If it had been humanly possible for Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett to lug her place in Hyndsville, South Carolina, along with her into the next world, plump it squarely in the middle of the Elysian Fields, plaster it over with "No Trespassing" signs, and then settle herself down to a blissful eternity of serving writs upon the angels for flying over her... more...

A SYLLABUS Having once, for a few months, had a literary column in a newspaper, I have come to admire those authors who place at the beginning of their books a "word" in which the whole thing is given away. The time that those words saved me in writing my reviews—time which otherwise would have been lost in reading the books—enabled me to write this book; a consummation which may have, in... more...

SOME YOUNG GIRLS FIND LOVE SO SWEET; TO OTHERS IT PROVES A CURSE. It was a magnificent evening, in balmy June, on the far-famed St. Lawrence. The steamer "St. Lawrence" was making her nightly search-light excursion down the bay, laden to her utmost capacity. The passengers were all summer tourists, light of heart and gay of speech; all save one, Hubert Varrick, a young and handsome man, dressed... more...

TO Belden, pacing the library doggedly, the waiting seemed interminable, the strain unnecessarily prolonged. A half-hour ago quick feet had echoed through the upper halls, windows had opened, doors all but slammed, vague whisperings and drawn breaths had hovered impalpably about the whole place; but now all was utterly quiet. His own regular footfall alone disturbed the unnatural stillness of a large... more...

I. IN A GARDEN "I wonder what makes Nick so late?" Carmen Gaylor thought, hovering in the doorway between the dim, cool hall and the huge veranda that was like an out-of-doors drawing-room. Though she spoke English well—almost as well as if she had not been born in Spain and made her greatest successes in the City of Mexico—Carmen thought in Spanish, for her heart was Spanish, and her... more...

CHAPTER I. Miss Althea Jakes was tired after her long journey from Basle. It was a brilliant summer afternoon, and though the shutters were half closed on the beating Parisian sunlight, the hotel sitting-room looked, in its brightness, hardly shadowed. Unpinning her hat, laying it on the table beside her, passing her hands over the undisordered folds of her hair, Miss Jakes looked about her at the... more...

CHAPTER I "Well, now we've done all we can, and all I mean to do," said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. "Everything's perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn't like it, we can't help it. I don't know why we make such a fuss." The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring... more...

LETTER I. Lady MARY SUTTON, at the German Spaw, to Miss WARLEY, in England. How distressing, how heart-rending, is my dear Fanny's mournful detail!—It lies before me; I weep over it!—I weep not for the departed saint: no; it is for you, myself, for all who have experienced her god-like virtues!—Was she not an honour to her sex? Did she not merit rewards too great for this world to... more...