A Terrible Temptation: A Story of To-Day

“MAY it please your Lordship: Gentlemen of the Jury--The plaintiff in this case is Richard Bassett, Esquire, the direct and lineal representative of that old and honorable famil...

OUR story now makes a bold skip. Compton Bassett was fourteen years old, a youth highly cultivated in mind and trained in body, but not very tall, and rather effeminate looking,...

GENERALLY deliberate crimes are followed by some great punishment; but they are also often attended in their course by briefer chastisements--single strokes from the whip that h...

“And your mother was a Le Compton. This poor boy was nursed by a servant. Oh, she has some good qualities, and is certainly devoted to us--to this day her face brightens at sigh...

“Oh,” said the doctor, “if your wit and his are both to be leveled at me, I had better stop your mouths. Dinner! dinner! Sir Charles, will you take Miss Wieland? Sorry we have n...

Then he left her, and she felt like a dead thing, with exhaustion. She lay on the sofa, and Sir Charles sat beside her, and made her drink a glass of wine.

Mr. Oldfield persisted, and, as he took the admiral's hint and lowered his voice, he was interrupted no more, but made a simple statement of those facts which are known to the r...

First his homely appearance, and now a certain languor about his manner, discouraged Lady Bassett more than it need; for all artists must pay for their excitements with occasion...

“Dear Reginald, you have been so good to me, and you are so clever; speak to some of the men, and let there be no more quarreling between papa and that man.”

LADY BASSETT was carried to her room, and did not reappear. She kept her own apartments, and her health declined so rapidly that Sir Charles sent for Dr. Willis. He prescribed f...

AT the steps of Huntercombe Hall the servants streamed out, and relieved the strangers of the sorrowful load. Sir Charles was carried into the Hall, and Richard Bassett turned a...

“Bella, my love,” said he, “now I'll tell you why I made you give me your signature this morning. The money has all come in for the wood, and this very day I sent Oldfield instr...

But dramatic incident is not everything: character and feeling show themselves in things that will not make pictures. Now it was precisely during this reposeful period that thre...

At eleven o'clock next morning a light carriage and pair came round to the Hall gate, and a large basket, a portmanteau, and a bag were placed on the roof under care of Moss; sm...

She appeared, however, at last, in a superb silk dress, the broad luster of which would have been beautiful, only the effect was broken and frittered away by six rows of gimp an...

BELLA BRUCE was drinking the bitterest cup a young virgin soul can taste. Illusion gone--the wicked world revealed as it is, how unlike what she thought it was--love crushed in...

“Yes,” said she, “we will have only one mother this time, will we, my darling? and it shall be Me.” Then suddenly, turning her head like a snake, “Oh, I saw the looks you gave t...

WITH this bitter reply Wheeler retired precipitately; the shaft pierced but one bosom; for the devoted wife, with the swift ingenuity of woman's love, had put both her hands rig...

Sir Charles obeyed this missive, and the lady received him with a gracious and smiling manner, all put on and catlike. She talked with him of indifferent things for more than an...

The mothers of ditto are bores too, flinging their human dumplings at every head; but, considering the tortures they have suffered, and the anguish the little egotistical viper...

He received her kindly, and showed himself a master; told her Sir Charles's was a mixed case, in which the fall, the fit, and a morbid desire for offspring had all played their...

So full was the joy of this loving pair that, for a long time, they sat rocking in each other's arms, and thought of nothing but their sorrows past, and the sea of bliss they we...

That scowl cost him dear, for Sir Charles thereupon represented to Bella that a man with a grievance is a bore to the very eye, and asked her to receive no more visits from his...

AT this monstrous declaration, from the very lips of the man's wife, there was a dead silence, Sir Charles being struck dumb, and Lady Bassett herself terrified at the sound of...

SOME days after this Mr. Rolfe received a line from Lady Bassett, to say she was at the Adelphi Hotel, in John Street. He put some letters into his pocket and called on her dire...

Now the other cunning little thing had come to apologize, if there was no other way to recover her admirer. But, on this confession, she said, “Oh, if you are sorry for it, I fo...

FOR the first few days Richard Bassett expected some annoyance from Mary Wells; but none came, and he began to flatter himself she was too fond of him to give him pain.

MARY WELLS by order went down, in a loose morning wrapper her mistress had given her, and dined in the servants' hall. She was welcomed with a sort of shout, half ironical; and...

A gentleman in the prime of life stood with his elbow on the broad mantel-piece, and made himself agreeable to a young lady, seated a little way off, playing at work.

Possessed with this dread, so natural to her situation, she set her house in order, and left her little legacies of clothes and jewels, without the help of a lawyer; for Sir Cha...

WHEN Sharpe's clerk retired, after serving that writ on Bassett, Bassett went to Wheeler and treated it as a jest. But Wheeler looked puzzled, and Bassett himself, on second tho...

COULD any one have looked through the keyhole at Lady Bassett waiting for Reginald, he would have seen, by the very movements of her body, the terrible agitation of the mind. Sh...

IN the present condition of her mind these words produced a strange effect on Lady Bassett. She quivered, and her eyes began to rove in that peculiar way I have already noticed;...

“I have got a letter, a most gratifying one. My friend called on Mr. Rolfe, and gave him my lines; and he replies direct to me. May I read you his letter?”

When the girl got this letter she felt a little faint for a moment; but she knew the man, his treachery, and his hard egotism and selfishness so well, that she tossed the letter...

SIR CHARLES BASSETT was now living in Elysium. Never was rake more thoroughly transformed. Every day he sat for hours at the feet of Bella Bruce, admiring her soft, feminine way...

Lady Bassett had the tact to put on an innocent look and smile, and say: “That is true, dearest. I _have_ tied you to my apron-string without mercy. But it serves you right for...

A BIG man, who seemed the leader, fired a volley of ferocious oaths at the keepers, and threatened to send them to hell that moment if they did not instantly deliver up that gen...

After so surveying her for some time she said: “I have been at him again, and there's a change for the better already. He is not the same man. You go and see else.”

MARY WELLS, like other uneducated women, was not accustomed to think long and earnestly on any one subject; to use an expression she once applied with far less justice to her si...

THEY were seated hand in hand, comparing notes and comforting each other. Then Lady Bassett met with a great surprise: forgetting, or rather not realizing, Sir Charles's sex and...

“Do not think me blind nor presumptuous; Sir Charles, when he wrote that letter, had reason to believe you had done him a deep injury by unfair means. Many will share that opini...

“Well,” said Wheeler, “it is not so very uncommon for a dark child to be born of fair parents, or _vice versa._ I once saw an urchin that was like neither father nor mother, but...

“Not she. It is her father's doing. Have a little patience. The whole thing shall be explained to them; and then she will soon soften the old man. 'It is not as if you were real...