A quiet valley

A spice of good-humored impatience breathed through the rich bass tones. George Rutherford stood in the hall of a somewhat primitive Welsh hotel. The door opening into a sitting...

GEORGE did not continue reading after his wife had made her way to the water’s edge, some few yards distant. She was soon busily engaged dabbling her hands in the clear water, s...

DINNER in the hotel was served always at six o’clock. Though now somewhat late in the season, tourists to the number of fifty still mustered around the table of horseshoe shape....

“NOW, Georgie, please,” Dulcibel said beseechingly, when her husband stood before her, dry-clothed once more, Joan vigorously kissing one of his hands. “Please tell me everythin...

“NOW we shall see!” Dulcibel announced in a tone of much excitement, as she drew near the door of a lonely cottage, walking by her husband’s side. On his other side trotted Joan...

SEVENTEEN years had passed away, bringing and leaving changes with them as they came and went. But the changes had at Woodleigh Hall been gentle and gradual in kind. George Ruth...

WOODLEIGH was a very scattered village, numbering about one thousand inhabitants all told, yet containing only one double row of straggling houses, which might by courtesy be te...

She was conscious of Mr. Brooke’s eyes upon her—fine black eyes still, remarkable in contrast with his snowy hair—and she raised her own to meet them. His gaze was searching and...

She did not so often now call him “Georgie” as “George,” which name indeed better befitted his fine presence. But associations of early married life were strong in this place, a...

TEN days of unshaded brightness followed. Joan ever after looked back upon that time as one of the fairest seasons in her life. She could not see then how dark a cloud was gathe...

JOHN CAIRNS was, as Mrs. Brooke had said of him, “quite a respectable farmer.” Nobody except disdainful Mrs. St. John would have thought of applying the term “milkman” to that g...

She wore a neat, though shabby, bonnet and cloak, and her thin, careworn face was turned full towards the light. It was a face which had been pretty once, though all traces of b...

Joan had been for some time sitting upright in her cushioned seat, trying to make out the features of the country through deepening nightshades. Ghostly white telegraph posts fl...

“YES; Mr. Rutherford belongs to my young days,” slowly repeated Marian Brooke, as she sat in the little smoking parlor of the old farm-house, alone with her brother, Jervis Cair...

Marian made the request with no sort of preface, standing within the door of the Cross Arms Hotel. The flurried waiter whom she had accosted stood still for an instant.

JOAN, not much more fit than Dulcibel to leave her bed, was a good deal more resolute in carrying out her own will. She would not permit any appeal to Leonard.

NEARLY a month had passed since the day of the collision, and George Rutherford still lay in the Cross Arms Hotel. It had been impossible to move him to his own home.

She was knitting a vague little mat with her small, limp, white hands, seated in Dulcibel’s bedroom, near the sofa on which Dulcibel lay. At the farthest of the three windows sa...

JOAN did not go upstairs to see Dulcibel. Nessie and Leonard would fain have persuaded her, but entreaties were thrown away. Joan seemed to be in the overmastering grasp of one...

All around Cairns farm a coating of snow lay over the fields, whitening hedges and outhouse roofs, and making tree-trunks look darker by contrast. The snow was not deep, but it...

Through the winter months he had crept back slowly to a certain stage of half-recovery, and there he stood still. In some respects he seemed almost like his old self—not quite,...

George Rutherford was in his study again—just able to creep down there once a day, for a few hours on the sofa. He did not rally from this attack, as from former attacks.

Joan put the question in abrupt point-blank fashion, with no sort of circumlocution. Mr. Brooke’s hauteur of manner increased, and so also did his aristocratic paleness. He was...

TWO days later, towards the close of the afternoon, Joan passed swiftly from her father’s room downstairs, on her way to the drawing-room. She did not wish to allow herself time...

GEORGE RUTHERFORD was going downhill steadily. Bodily and mental powers seemed to be failing him together. As the long summer days grew brighter and more warm he appeared to be...

Hardly “making no effort,” for she did occasionally allow herself one bitter-sweet pleasure. Now and then she would find her way to Woodleigh Church, and feast her eyes upon the...

AS Jervis had opened the door to his sister, one wintry evening, months earlier, so now he opened it to his niece. But he no more knew Joan to be his niece than he had known Mar...

Nothing outside mattered much. She came and went listlessly, took her share in housework, ran little errands for Hannah, mended, darned, washed-up—did anything that had to be do...

THE drowsiness which had come on did not pass off quickly. When Mr. Forest called, he said little at first beyond an echo of Leo’s “I do not like it.” But he paid a second call...

“OH no! I couldn’t think of it, George. I am quite too old for swinging bridges now. I couldn’t, really,” said Dulcibel. Two years had gone by, and once more they were in their...