"Effie! What the devil are you up to?" Her husband's voice, chopping through her mood of terrified rapture, made her heart jump like a startled cat, yet by some miracle of feminine self-control her body did not show a tremor. Dear God, she thought, he mustn't see it. It's so beautiful, and he always kills beauty. "I'm just looking at the Moon," she said listlessly.... more...

(I) "I think you're behaving like an absolute idiot," said Jack Kirkby indignantly. Frank grinned pleasantly, and added his left foot to his right one in the broad window-seat. These two young men were sitting in one of the most pleasant places in all the world in which to sit on a summer evening—in a ground-floor room looking out upon the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge. It... more...

CHAPTER I. BESIDE STILL WATERS. The youth in the multi-coloured blazer laughed. “You’d have to come and be a nurse,” he suggested. “Oh, I’d go as a drummer-boy. I’d look fine in uniform, wouldn’t I?” the waitress simpered in return. Dennis Burnham swallowed his liqueur in one savage gulp, pushed back his chair, and rose from the table. “Silly young ass,” he said, in a voice loud... more...

Between two and three years ago, the following pithy advertisement appeared in several of the London papers:— "Country Lodgings.—Apartments to let in a large farm-house,situate in a cheap and pleasant village, about forty milesfrom London. Apply (if by letter post-paid) to A. B., No. 7,Salisbury-street, Strand." Little did I think, whilst admiring in the broad page of the Morning Chronicle... more...

THE Hermit lived in a cave in the hollow of a hill. Below him was a glen, with a stream in a coppice of oaks and alders, and on the farther side of the valley, half a day's journey distant, another hill, steep and bristling, which raised aloft a little walled town with Ghibelline swallow-tails notched against the sky. When the Hermit was a lad, and lived in the town, the crenellations of the walls... more...

I A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible open majestically before him, and... more...

THE CASTLE OF VAUTSBERG ON THE RHINE. A chamber in a tower. PRINCE HENRY, sitting alone, ill and restless.  Prince Henry. I cannot sleep! my fervid brainCalls up the vanished Past again,And throws its misty splendors deepInto the pallid realms of sleep!A breath from that far-distant shoreComes freshening ever more and more,And wafts o'er intervening seasSweet odors from the Hesperides!A wind,... more...

CHAPTER I IN A HOSTILE COUNTRY Eastward out of the Torquilla Range the Burntwood River emerged from a gorge, flowing swift and turbulent during the spring months, shallow and murmurous the rest of the year, to pass through a basin formed by low mountains and break forth at last from a canyon and wind away over the mesa. In the canyon was being erected the huge reservoir dam which was in the future to... more...

CHAPTER I THE FIGHT IN THE FOREST Cold winter lay deep in the Canadian wilderness. Over it the moon was rising, like a red pulsating ball, lighting up the vast white silence of the night in a shimmering glow. Not a sound broke the stillness of the desolation. It was too late for the life of day, too early for the nocturnal roamings and voices of the creatures of the night. Like the basin of a great... more...

I. THE WOMAN WITH THE DIAMOND I was, perhaps, the plainest girl in the room that night. I was also the happiest—up to one o'clock. Then my whole world crumbled, or, at least, suffered an eclipse. Why and how, I am about to relate. I was not made for love. This I had often said to myself; very often of late. In figure I am too diminutive, in face far too unbeautiful, for me to cherish... more...