Beyond These Voices

Lady Felicia Disbrowe was supposed to condescend when she married Captain Cunningham of the first Life--since, although his people lived on their own land, and were handsomely r...

It was the middle of February, and all the little gardens that lay like a fringe along the edge of the olive woods had become one vivid pink with peach blossoms, while the dull...

The sky over a funeral should be low and grey, with a soft, fine rain falling, and no ray of sunshine to mock the mourners' gloom; but over Giulia Provana's funeral train the sk...

Shadows of a November twilight are gathering in the two great drawing-rooms of the largest house in Portland Place, rooms that have the grandeur of space, and a certain gloomy s...

When a woman's imagination, still young and ardent, begins to find the things of earth as Hamlet found them, "weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable," it is only natural that she...

Mario Provana's wife was the fashion. The prestige for which some women strive and labour for years, spending themselves and their husband's fortunes in the strenuous endeavour,...

"Well, now your whim has been gratified, I should like to know what you think of Francis Symeon?" Claude Rutherford asked, as he put down his hat in Vera's sanctum, the day afte...

While Claude Rutherford's peril was a subject of troubled thought for his mother and her friend and father confessor, Cyprian Hammond, no friendly voice had breathed words of wa...

The meeting in Mr. Symeon's library lasted all through the summer afternoon, till the edge of evening. The large and gloomy room was darkened by Venetian shutters, nearly closed...

Vera was walking up and down her drawing-room at twenty minutes past eight, dressed in one of those filmy white evening gowns with which her wardrobe was always supplied, one of...

It was Saturday, and they were at River Mead--one of those ideal places that seem to have been raised along the upper Thames by an enchanter's wand rather than by the vulgar art...

The season was dying hard. Lady Leominster's ball, at the great old house at Fulham, was the last flash of an expiring fire. The Houses of Parliament had closed their historic d...

Mrs. Provana's French maid was the first witness at the coroner's inquest. The first question she had to answer was as to when she had last seen Mr. Provana alive; and the same...

"Why should you make a martyr of yourself?" Susie urged in her vehement way. "You can do him no good. He will not know. All the dead want is silence and darkness, and to be mour...

Lord Okehampton, discussing the financier's fate in a _tête-à-tête_ dinner with his wife, was only one among a multitude who were thinking of the Provana murder. There is nothin...

Everybody in the Red Book had left London. The West End was a desert, and the shrill summons of the telephone was heard no more in Mayfair. Nobody, unless it were the caretaker,...

Father Cyprian Hammond returned to his comfortable rooms in the north-west region one rainy autumn evening after a long day in the dreariest abodes of East London. He was almost...

The six weeks' captivity on the hill in Sussex had been a success, and Vera was able to leave England before the first November fog descended upon Portland Place. She was in Rom...

Mrs. Rutherford and Vera drove to the hill behind the Medici Villa in the golden light of a Roman November, when the gardens on the height were glowing with foliage that seemed...

It was a little less than three weeks after the meeting in the house of silence; but to Vera the interval seemed an endless procession of slow, grey days and fevered nights--nig...

Just two years after the sudden close of Mr. Rutherford's retreat there was a quiet wedding in Father Hammond's chapel--a bride without bridesmaids, a marriage without music, a...

Mrs. Rutherford was the fashion in that first year of her second marriage, just as she had been in her London début as Madame Provana. It seemed as if one of the fairies at her...

Vera told her husband that she did not mind solitude; yet it was a face of ashen whiteness that he left behind when he shut the door of her dressing-room, after his hurried and...

The Goodwood of that year was a brilliant meeting. The winners were the horses that all the smart people wanted to win. The weather, with the exception of that first rainy twili...

Finding Claude Rutherford the most agreeable person in a house full of people, Mrs. Bellenden took possession of him on the first evening--not with any obvious devices or allure...

Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford were to winter in Rome, but there was the autumn still to be disposed of. Neither of them wanted Marienbad. They knew the place inside out, and hated it;...

The Roman villa was a fairy palace of light and flowers, and its long range of windows flashed across the blue vapours of the December night, and might have been noticed as a go...

It was the end of February, and the Roman villa was soon to be left to cobwebs and custodians. The Piazza d'Ispagnia and the broad steps of the Trinità were alive with spring fl...

Everything was dead. That had been Vera's answer when Claude asked despairingly if love was dead. The words were in her mind now as she stood alone in the room where her poets,...

After Susan Amphlett's disappearance the house in Portland Place was given over to silence and solitude. Lady Okehampton was at Disbrowe, where she was on duty as a model grandm...

Chorus was at work again; not at a London dinner-table this time, but in the easier atmosphere of a North Riding manor house, which men left in the morning to shoot grouse, and...

Father Cyprian Hammond sat alone in the winter gloaming after a hard day's work in his parish, which was a large one, covering several of those obscure little slums that lie hid...