A Fool There Was

John Schuyler had come to be a big man and a broad one--big in the great things of life that sometimes are so small, big in the small things of life that sometimes are so great....

Left alone, John Schuyler sat for long, never-ending moments. He was weak--weak unto the weakness of death. His soul was torn and tossed and twitched within him. At length he ro...

Schuyler came hurrying down the deck, Blake and Parks close behind. There was on his face the smile of great gladness. He placed one strong arm about his wife, the other about h...

In the next few years, God was indeed good to John Schuyler. Health he kept; honors came to him, and the respect of men and of women. There were those who loved him, many; and o...

He lifted weakly, balancing himself upon unsteady, weakened legs. Blake, stepping back, found his hand against a glass of water. He seized it-- advanced a step--and cast the con...

"Then what are you going to do?" she demanded. "Are you going on forever being honest neither with him nor with yourself--compromising on the one hand with your womanhood, on th...

Mrs. VanVorst had been very ill. A fever, contracted in South Africa where she had been with her husband--a fever gained in a futile effort to save the life of that husband, had...

Schuyler came down the stairs slowly, leaning heavily against the broken balustrade. He laughed a little, wildly, with the mirthless chill that is of a maniac. His knees bent; h...

Dr. DeLancey, sitting under the awning of the after deck of "The Idlesse," and gazing out upon the sound where Jack Schuyler, Tom Blake and Kathryn Blair were defying the laws o...

The car stopped before the porte-cochere. Blake alighted. He knew well the way. He did not ring; for the door was unlocked--ajar. Jaw close set-- lips but a thin straight line,...

It had been arranged that Blake, again, was to go to him first. Little had been heard of John Schuyler, of late. A drop to desuetude may of its last half be far more silent than...

In the littleness of things, it so happened that at a time when John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake, serious, solemn, side-by- side, were telling the widow of Jim...

To begin a story of this kind at the beginning is hard; for when the beginning may have been, no man knows. Perhaps it was a hundred years ago--perhaps a thousand--perhaps ten t...

He did not see her enter. He did not hear her enter. Yet he knew that she was there, although he had left her across an ocean.... Another sense, it seemed, there was within him....

"What a splendid revivalist was lost to the world when your friend became a mere broker!" And to Blake: "Why once or twice I myself became almost enthusiastic. Really, sir, you...

From across the table she was laughing at him, brightly, merrily-- laughing to see the havoc that she had wrought in the soul of a man. He turned to her, almost savagely.

Toward the child of his friend, and of his friend's wife, Blake felt not as men in his place would have felt. The love that he had for the dainty little thing of gold-brown hair...

The storm that had come hissing across the Sound did not last long. Its very fierceness, it seemed, was its own undoing. Its frenzy soon passed. And anon the sun shone; the droo...

Blake waited in the embrasure of the window, gazing down upon the Avenue below, with its confusion of moving vehicles and pedestrians. The June sun was overhead, warming the ear...

To the budding mind of young Jack Schuyler, life was a very pleasant affair. It began each morning at six thirty; and from then on until eight at night, there was something to f...

The library of John Schuyler's town house was a large room, done in dull browns and deep greens. All that good taste and a sufficient purse could do to beautify it--to render it...

There had been in France a man of the nobility--a man in whose veins flowed the blood of three kings--a man handsome of face, graceful of figure, debonair--a man who had sinned...

Time passed on over the heads of young Jack Schuyler and young Tom Blake and the daughter of Jimmy Blair. They grew in stature, and in intellect. They grew through the grades of...

It was two months later. In the little garden that lay on the side of the big, rambling house at Larchmont where the sun best loved to dwell, roses were in bloom; and roses, eve...

He had told Parks to come to him as soon as they were under way. There were certain letters that he wished to get off in time to send them back on the pilot boat. Parks found hi...

He came slinking down the deck of the liner, furtive of eye, uneven of tread. A young man he was--and yet old; for while his body told of youth, his face bespoke age--the unnatu...

She rang at headlong speed through that arbor way. Another moment and Blake had entered, carrying her in his arms. Kathryn extended her hand to him; he took it in warm, firm, fr...

Blake took the letter. With its taking there came to him a premonition that the things that he had suspected--the things that he had heard--the things that to him were as unbeli...

Blake, leaving the house, lifted Muriel into the big, French car and got in beside her. Her little mind was in great puzzlement; and of Blake she began to ask the countless ques...

It so happened that, on the winter after Jack Schuyler and Tom Blake graduated from college, death came to the big houses on the Avenue. Mrs. John Stuyvesant Schuyler went first...

It is of necessity that a story such as this should be episodical, lapsical, disconnected. Its inception lies in two countries, and of different people. And it is, in its beginn...

Blake had suspected; but he had refused to believe. Now he knew. And half an hour later, "The Vagrant," under full head of steam, was surging down the Sound with a great, white...

Blake waited on the yacht, in the harbor of Liverpool. It was hard for him to sit idly by at such a time; but he felt that it was best. There was in his soul a great pity, to be...

A winter had come, and gone. It had been a bitter winter, and a cold. For Kathryn Schuyler had it been a bitter winter, indeed. Sick of heart, sick of body, she had stayed in th...

"Well, there's more to that story. Would you like to hear it?" He did not wait for her answer; he spoke swiftly, surely. Elinor, across the table, eyed him curiously. Kathryn, s...

John Stuyvesant Schuyler's end was different. He was a man reserved--a man who thought much and told little. His illness baffled Dr. DeLancey at first; but then he knew what the...

"But," protested Tom Blake, "we've got so much money, and they--Isn't there some way that you can fix it, doctor? You know how to do these things; and we're so helpless."