Captivating Mary Carstairs

From the roaring ovation which followed Peter's brief remarks there emerged again the sudden, clean-cut silence. Mayor Hare--Mayor by the narrowest margin in the heaviest vote e...

The expectation appeared thoroughly conservative: not a cloud so large as a man's hand any longer darkened the horizon. At two o'clock next day Mr. Carstairs's _Cypriani_ rode g...

Peter's pronounced views as to Mr. Stanhope were not, it appeared, purely of the stuff that dreams are made of. Testimony to the author's lack of popularity in his native town c...

In the new-made study of his Remsen road cottage, Ferris Stanhope, Hunston's returned celebrity, sat under a green-shaded lamp and frowned down at a sheaf of his own neat manusc...

Thus it happened that the southbound local, which went through at eight-ten, did not acquire Varney as a passenger that night; and his old friend, Elbert Carstairs, did not meet...

Garbed in a suit of Varney's clothes, warmed beneath his belt by a libation from the _Cypriani's_ choicest stock, eased as to his person by a pillow beneath his head and a comfo...

He had sat upright, his hands over his chair-arms, his mind and muscle tense; but at that unbelievable sight, he fell back in his chair relaxed, staring and dazed like one who s...

The boats were on their hooks, swung outboard ready for instant use. The crew, tumbling out swiftly at the call, cleared away one and let it fall over the side. The young men we...

In a rear room of a quaint little house uptown, a great bronzed-faced man sat at a piano, a dead pipe between his teeth, and absently played the most difficult of Beethoven's so...

There was a fine old hedge of box bordering the Carstairs lawn, old rosebushes inside it and many flowering shrubs. Splendid oaks curtained the big white house on either side, s...

Peter had not yet returned to the yacht when Varney went to bed that night. Like the Finnegan of song, he was gone again when Varney rose next morning. Indeed, it was only too c...

Varney slept badly. The night was long, like art and the lanes that have no turning; and interludes punctuated it, now and again, when he lay wide-eyed in his bunk, staring into...

"If it were, I'm sure I should be able to offer you a light at the least. If it were yours, now that I stop to think--well, perhaps it _would_ be a little eccentric for you to b...

Passing the town-wharf laggingly like the maimed thing she was, limping nearer and nearer the spot whence she had set out three-quarters of an hour before, Mr. Carstairs's _Cypr...

So Elbert Carstairs's dream had come true, and his daughter was going home to him at his desire. She stood on his yacht, as truly a prisoner as though she wore a ball and chain;...

Varney crossed the square in the gathering dusk and went slowly up Main Street, looking about him as he walked. He had wrenched his ankle slightly in one of his falls upon the _...

At half past six o'clock, or thereabouts, James Hackley dragged slowly up Main Street. He was garbed in his working suit of denim blue, trimmed with monkey wrench and chisel, an...

Four miles downstream, the river's banks grew a long mile apart, and the scenery was lonesome and a little wild. Here, as it chanced, there was flung across the water a thin, ro...

Varney found the new proprietor at the hotel, completing a hurried supper, and Peter hailed him with astonishment and delight. All afternoon he had been bursting with his great...

Clearly he must see Peter, at once, before that impetuous enthusiast had had time to involve himself in anything, and tell him bluntly that he must leave the affairs of Hunston...

The landscape near Hunston, as it happened, was superfluously pretty. It deserved a group of resident artists to admire and to catch it upon canvas; and it had, roughly speaking...

Varney was wrong in one thing: Mr. Carstairs's _Cypriani_ was not ready to start anywhere at half a day's notice. For that reason it did not start for Hunston on the following a...

"You would explain to a man," she said, "and don't you think you ought to to me? If you did not know exactly who you thought I was, why should my name surprise you so?"