Captain Desmond, V.C.

Desmond's voice, followed by a peremptory rap on the door, startled the girl back to a realisation of the flight of time. The sun had set, and a grey light filled the room. With...

"No proposition Euclid wrote, No formulae the text-books show, Will turn the bullet from your coat, Or ward the tulwar's downward blow: Strike hard, who cares--shoot straight, w...

For a few hours Honor slept soundly. But so soon as her bodily exhaustion was repaired, grief and stress of mind dragged her back to consciousness. She woke long before dawn; wo...

Honor sat alone in the drawing-room, a basket of socks and stockings at her elbow, her thoughts working as busily as her needle. This girl had reduced the prosaic necessity of d...

"Yes, quite. Mrs Rivers was so clever. She paired us off beautifully. My pair was Captain Winthrop of the Ghurkas; an awfully nice man. He talked to me the whole time. He knows...

"The faith of men that ha' brothered men, By more than easy breath; And the eyes o' men that ha' read wi' men, In the open books of death." --KIPLING.

Certain souls, like certain bodies, cannot breathe for long at a stretch the rarefied atmosphere of the heights; and towards the end of the second week Evelyn's zeal began to we...

Frank Olliver had moved into the blue bungalow, at Desmond's request, an arrangement more satisfying to Honor than to his wife; and the Pioneer Regiment from Pindi had added a c...

Not many days later Desmond's advertisements appeared simultaneously in the only two newspapers of Upper India; and he set his face like a flint in anticipation of the universal...

To say that Owen Kresney was annoyed would be to do him an injustice. He was furious at the unlooked-for interruption, which bade fair to cancel all that he had been at such pai...

Frank Olliver, looking remarkably fresh and cool in a holland gown of severe simplicity, greeted him from the verandah with a flour-covered hand. At the sound of hoofs, her read...

By mid-April, life in the blue bungalow had undergone an unmistakable change for the better; and Theo Desmond, sitting alone in the congenial quietness of his study, an after-di...

Wyndham, returning to the bungalow soon after ten o'clock, found it readjusted to its new conditions. Frank Olliver had returned to her empty home; and Desmond, at his own reque...

The measure of a man's worth is not to be found in a heroic impulse or a fine idea, but in the steadfast working out of either through weeks and months--when the glow has faded...

The great monsoon--a majestic onrush of cloud hurtling across the heavens, with dazzle of lightning and clangour of thunder--had long since rolled up from India's coastline to h...

The full moon hung low in the west like a lamp. A chequered mantle of light and shadow lay over the mountain-barrier of India's north-western frontier, and over the desolate lev...

"White hands cling to the tightened rein, Slipping the spur from the booted heel, Tenderest voices cry 'Turn again!' Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel. High hopes faint on a...

When Evelyn Desmond stumbled out of her husband's presence, stunned, bewildered, blinded with tears, the one coherent thought left in her mind was--Honor. Amid all that was terr...

Honor woke early, springing from dreamless sleep to alert wakefulness, as is the way of vivid natures, and the first sight that greeted her was the huddled form of Parbutti, her...

The Fancy Ball, given on Old Year's night by the Punjab Commission, was, in Evelyn's eyes, the supreme event of the week; and when Desmond, after a mad gallop from the Bengal Ca...

Quite a little party of a quiet kind assembled in the drawing-room for tea--Frank Olliver, Mrs Conolly, Wyndham, and his subaltern George Rivers, a promising probationer of a ye...

The afternoon sunlight flung lengthening shadows across the cavalry Lines, where men and native officers alike were housed in mud-plastered huts, innocent of windows; and where...

Evelyn Desmond's picnic was an accomplished fact. At four o'clock, in the full glare of a late March sun, a business-like detachment of twenty horses, and one disdainful camel,...

A low sun was gilding the hill-tops when two doolies, borne by sturdy _kahars_ and escorted by Wyndham and Mackay, passed between the gate-posts of Desmond's bungalow. Honor sto...

Sixteen months earlier, Evelyn Dacre--having come out to India with a party of tourist friends--had chanced to spend Christmas week at Lahore: a week which brings half the Punja...

She came at his bidding, and put her hand in his. But, unwittingly, she stood no nearer than the action demanded; and in her bewildered misery she forgot that he would expect he...

Owen Kresney possessed in a high degree that talent for discovering or inventing slights which is pride of race run crooked, and reveals the taint of mixed blood in a man's vein...

The suggestion was so graciously proffered that Honor deposited a light kiss on the coiled floss silk of Evelyn's hair as she bent above the table. Then she took up the tray, an...

His wife herself was, in the meanwhile, journeying hopefully back to the Kresneys' bungalow, on the shoulders of four long-suffering jhampanis, who murmured a little among thems...

The nearest approach to shops, in the accepted sense of the word, were the open stalls in the native city. But there could be no question of exploring these; and the manifold ne...

He studied Honor Meredith as a man only studies that on which his life's happiness depends; and during the past few weeks he had become aware of a mysterious change in the girl'...

Not until night condemned her to solitude and thought did Honor frankly confront the calamity that had come upon her with the force of a blow, cutting her life in two, shatterin...

On all sides of the huge square eight thousand spectators, of every rank and race and colour, were wedged into a compact mass forty or fifty deep: while in the central space, ei...

Then she saw the hard lines of his mouth, the inexpressible pain in his eyes; and, clutching at his rigid forearm, tried to force it down. She might as well have tried to shift...

"If we impinge, never so lightly, on the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens, in unending circl...