Adrienne Toner: A Novel

"Come down to Coldbrooks next week-end, will you, Roger?" said Barney Chadwick. He had been wandering around the room, pausing once to glance at the César Franck on the piano an...

Roger Oldmeadow went to have tea with Mrs. Aldesey next afternoon. She was, after the Chadwicks, his nearest friend, and his relation to the Chadwicks was one of affection rathe...

The Chadwicks all had a certain sulkiness in their charming looks, and where in Barney it mingled with sweetness, in Palgrave, his younger brother, it mingled with brilliancy. I...

"Come out and have a stroll," said Oldmeadow to Nancy. Tea was over and a primrose-coloured sunset filled the sky. They walked up and down the gravelled terrace before the house.

Miss Toner did not come down to breakfast next morning and Oldmeadow was conscious of a feeling of disproportionate relief at not finding her in the big, bare, panelled dining-r...

She had joined Oldmeadow on the rickety old bench where he sat reading and smoking in a sunny corner of the garden. A band of golden wallflowers behind them exhaled the deep fra...

"I do so want a talk with you, Roger," Mrs. Chadwick murmured to him when tea was over. The dining-room opened at one end of the hall and the drawing-room at the other and the m...

He sat, for the first time, next Miss Toner that night at dinner and Nancy sat across from them next Barney. Nancy was pale, and now that he could scrutinize her he imagined tha...

"Rather nice to think that there are so many good and innocent people in the world, isn't it," Barney remarked, when he, Palgrave and Oldmeadow were left to their wine and cigar...

Palgrave had not gone to the drawing-room, and that, at all events, was a comfort. A wood fire burned on the hearth and near it Nancy was holding wool for Mrs. Chadwick to wind....

It was a soft June day and Oldmeadow was strolling about Mrs. Averil's garden admiring her herbaceous borders. It was a day that smelt of ripening strawberries, of warm grass an...

Oldmeadow sat beside Adrienne Chadwick and knew that from the other end of the room, where he talked to Mrs. Aldesey, Barney's eyes were on them, though he tried to keep them of...

He had come as soon as the very next day--to exonerate, not to apologize; that was evident at once. Oldmeadow had not long to wait before learning what she had said to him when...

The incident put Mrs. Aldesey quite out of his mind, and it was not till he stood on her doorstep and rang her bell that he remembered his grievance against her and realized tha...

On a morning in early March Oldmeadow found, among the letters waiting for him on his breakfast-table, one from Nancy. Nancy and he, with all their fondness, seldom wrote to eac...

It was Saturday and he had to wire to Mrs. Aldesey that he could not go with her next day to the Queen's Hall concert they had planned to hear together.

Oldmeadow sat in Barney's study, Mrs. Chadwick beside him. It was Tuesday and the only news of Barney had been a letter to his mother, from Paris, where he had not found Meg, an...

Oldmeadow did not see Barney again for some months. He met Eleanor Chadwick towards the end of April, in the park, he on his way to Mrs. Aldesey's, she, apparently, satisfying h...

The picture of Adrienne holding them up was spread before Oldmeadow's eyes on the hot July day when Mrs. Averil drove him up from the Little House to Coldbrooks. The shade of th...

The war thus had its uses to Mrs. Chadwick. Barbara did not go to the Tyrol. By the end of September Oldmeadow and Barney were in training, one on the Berkshire and one on the W...

Palgrave, apparently, had formed no conjectures as to their conversation and was thinking still of Adrienne's wrongs rather than of his own situation. "Did you take her home?" h...

He had only written a line of his failure and that he would come as soon as he could and see them all and tell in full of his interview with Palgrave. And he had motored over to...

"Oh, no, she couldn't, Roger," said Mrs. Chadwick, "she won't go anywhere. She'll hardly speak to Monica. She just sits out-of-doors, all day, wrapped in a cloak, in the corner...

"That's the way Mummy surprises one," said Barney as he and Oldmeadow went together through the Coldbrooks woods. "One feels her, usually, such a darling goose and then, suddenl...

Tears were in his own eyes. He stepped out on to the flagged path of the little plot in front of the house where strips of turf and rose-beds ran between the house and the high...

Oldmeadow sat in Mrs. Aldesey's drawing-room and, the tea-table between them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years, that they found each other. So it wa...

Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst part of war had been to see the suff...

He had heard from Coldbrooks, of course; letters came often now. And the dark young nurse had written for him since he could not yet write for himself. He had said no word of se...

He did not see her again for two days; and she did not even come at night. But he now kept possession of his new strength and slept without her help. The sense of happiness broo...

She might feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she imagined him resigned, if not conver...

Her eyes met his for a long time before he realized that she might find not only irrelevance but even irreverence. She had shown him her very soul and he had answered with this...

Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been, though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of the discrepancies between them, and du...

Oldmeadow sat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off speaking to Adrienne till their last...

The gilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to Adrienne's door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his heart sank as he wondered if she...