A House-Party, Don Gesualdo, and A Rainy June

Meantime, Gesualdo was striving with the utmost force that was in him to persuade the real criminal to confess publicly what he had told under the seal of confession. He saw the...

The winter passed away, and with February the corn spread a green carpet everywhere, the almond-trees blossomed on the hill-sides, the violets opened the way for the wind-flower...

The crickets were chirping, the lizards were gliding, the butterflies were flying above the ripe corn, the reapers were out among the wheat, and the tall stalks were swaying and...

"Poor innocent, he meant well!" thought the steward, as he watched the dark, slender form of the priest pass away through the vines and mulberry-trees. The young man did not gre...

Gervase saunters in to his hostess's boudoir the next morning, availing himself of the privilege accorded to that distant relationship which it pleases them both to raise into a...

Dorothy Usk is not pleased. She does not want her Russian ph[oe]nix to admire Brandolin. She has arranged an alliance in her own mind between the Princess Sabaroff and her own c...

It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts; it has oak furniture of the same p...

The very bachelor rooms at Surrenden are conducive to revery and indolence, cosily comfortable and full of little attentions for the guest's _bien-être_, among which there is a...

Lord Gervase was eight years younger when he wrote those letters than he is now, and he has unpleasant recollections of unpleasant passages in them which would compromise him in...

A few new people have come by the brake, and make their appearance at luncheon. More come by the five-o'clock train, and are visible at six-o'clock tea, which is always to be ha...

"The Babe is a better courtier than gardener," says Xenia Sabaroff, as she shakes a green aphis out of her rose: her tone is careless, but her voice is not quite under her comma...

"George!" She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman should be. _He_ does not keep black wo...

"Brandolin was in the home wood with Madame Sabaroff as we returned from church," remarks Dolly Usk. "They were together under a larch-tree. They looked as if they were on the b...

Let it not for an instant be supposed that the guests of Surrenden are people looked in the least coldly or shyly on by society. Not they. They go to drawing-rooms, which means...

"I don't think you are quite just to her: you know I always tell you so." (Brandolin remembers the sweetness with which Dorothy Usk invites Lady Waverley season after season.) "...

Brandolin walks down the opening between the glass doors into the garden. He paces impatiently the green shady walks where he has seen her on other mornings than this. It is lov...

Meanwhile, let the country be going to the dogs as it may, Surrenden is full of very gay people, and all its more or less well-matched doves are cooing at Surrenden, whilst the...