Cobwebs and Cables

But Roland Sefton sat silent, with his shapely hands resting on his knees, and his handsome face turned toward the hearth, where the logs had burned down and emitted only a low...

The next day Phebe locked up her house and rode down to Riversborough. As she descended into the valley and the open plain beyond her sorrowfulness fell away from her. Her socia...

Long as the daylight lasts in May it was after nightfall when Felicita left her study and went down to the drawing-room, more elegantly and expensively furnished for her than th...

All the next day Phebe remained very near to her father, leaving her house-work and painting to sit beside him on the low chair he had carved for her when she was a child. For t...

It was early in June, and the days were at the longest. Never before had Phebe found the daylight too long, but now it shone upon dismantled and disordered rooms, which reminded...

The district on which his vicar directed Felix to concentrate his efforts was by no means a neglected one. It was rather suffering from the multitude of laborers, who had chosen...

Phebe found herself alone, with the burden of Jean Merle's secret resting on her unshared. It depended upon her sagacity and tact whether he should escape being connected in a m...

When Felix returned from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen that they were always plucking up ea...

Felicita was slowly recovering her strength at the sea-side. She had never before felt so seriously shaken in health, as since she had known of the attachment of Felix to Alice...

When Phebe entered Westminster Abbey the next day the morning service was already begun. Upon the bench nearest the door sat a working-man, in worn-out clothes, whose gray hair...

Felicita had followed the urgent advice of her physicians in giving up writing for a season. There was no longer any necessity for her work, as some time since the money which R...

In his lonely garret in the East End, Jean Merle was living in an isolation more complete even than that of Engelberg. There he had known at least the names of those about him,...

I cannot tell whether it was fancy merely, but the morning light which streamed into his room seemed more familiar and home-like to him than it had ever done in Switzerland. He...

About the same hour that Roland Sefton set off under shelter of old Marlowe's wagon to attempt his escape, Mr. Clifford, the senior partner in the firm, reached Riversborough by...

The weeks passed by in Riversborough, and brought no satisfactory conclusion to the guarded investigations of the police. A close search made among Acton's private papers produc...

Roland Sefton did not sleep that night. As the time drew near for Felicita to act upon his message to her, he grew more desponding of her response to it; yet he could not give u...

Roland Sefton's pocket-book, containing his passport and the papers and photographs, had reached Mr. Clifford the day before, with an official intimation of his death from the c...

Life had put on for Phebe a very changed aspect. The lonely farmstead on the uplands had been till now a very happy and tranquil home. She had had no sorrow since her mother die...

It was past noon when Felicita was driven up to the hotel in the village, where, when she had last been at Engelberg, she had gone to look upon the dead face of the stranger, wh...

Phebe's nearest neighbor, except the farm-laborer who did an occasional day's labor for her father, was Mrs. Nixey, the tenant of a farmhouse, which lay at the head of a valley...

Late as it was, though the handsome office-clock on the chimney-piece had already struck eleven, Roland Sefton did not move. He had not stirred hand or foot for a long while now...

Now there was no longer a doubt weighing upon his spirit, Felix longed to tell his mother all. The slight cloud that had arisen of late years between them was so gossamer-like y...

It was all in vain that Mr. Clifford tried to turn Felicita from her resolution. Phebe cordially upheld her, and gave her courage to persist against all arguments. Both of them...

Alice Pascal looked up into Jean Merle's face with the frank and easy self-possession of a well-bred English woman; coloring a little with girlish shyness, yet at the same time...

On the same August morning when Felix was riding up the long lovely lanes to Phebe Marlowe's little farmstead, Canon Pascal and Alice were starting by the earliest boat which le...

When he left the cemetery Jean Merle went home to his wretched chalet, flung himself down on his rough bed, and slept for some hours the profound and dreamless sleep of utter ex...

She had not uttered a word to him; but her smile and the tender gesture of her dying hands had spoken more than words. He stood motionless, gazing down upon her, and upon Phebe,...

The room was a small one, with a dim, many-colored light pervading it; for the upper part of the mullioned casement was filled with painted glass, and even the panes of the lowe...

The busy, monotonous years ran through their course tranquilly, marked only by a change of residence from the narrow little house suited to Felicita's slender means to a larger,...

After speaking to Canon Pascal for a few minutes, with an agitation and a reserve which he could not but observe, Phebe left the house to go home. In one of the darkest corners...

The massive pile of the old Abbey stood darkly against the sky, with not a glimmer of light shining through its many windows; whilst behind it the Houses of Parliament, now in f...

Roland advanced a few paces into the gaudy salon, with its mirrors reflecting his and Felicita's figures over and over again, and stood still, at a little distance from her, wit...

From a profound and dreamless sleep Jean Merle awoke early the next morning, with the blessed feeling of being at home again in his father's house. The heavy cross-beams of blac...

The winter fogs which made London so gloomy did not leave the country sky clear and bright. All the land lay under a shroud of mist and vapor; and even on the uplands round old...

Felicita hurried homeward night and day without stopping, as if she had been pursued by a deadly enemy. Madame and the children were not at Scarborough, but at a quiet little fi...

If old Marlowe, or Mr. Clifford himself, could have followed Roland Sefton during his homeless wanderings, their rigorous sense of justice would have been satisfied that he was...

There was one other place he must see before he went out again from this region of many memories, to which all that he could call life was linked--the little farmstead on the hi...

Though the night had been stormy, the sun rose brightly on the rain-washed streets, and the roofs and walls stood out with a peculiar clearness, and with a more vivid color than...

For the first time in her life those who were about Phebe Marlowe felt that she was under a cloud. The sweet sunny atmosphere, as of a clear and peaceful day, which seemed to su...

The miserable, delapidated hut at the entrance of Engelberg, with no light save that which entered by the doorway, had been Jean Merle's home since he had fixed his abode in the...

Felicita's study was so quiet a room, quite remote from the street, that it was almost a wonder the noise of the crowd had reached her. But this morning there had been a pleasan...

Several months passed away, bringing no visitor to Riversborough, except Phebe, who came down two or three times to see Mr. Clifford, whose favorite she was. But Phebe never spo...

They stood silent for a few moments;--moments which seemed hours to Phebe. The stranger--for who could be so great a stranger as one who had been many years dead?--had advanced...

"But why go home?" Felix stopped as he asked himself this question. He could not face his mother with any inquiry about the mystery that surrounded his father's memory, that mys...

To forgive his father--that was a strange inversion of the attitude of Felix's mind in regard to his father's memory. He had been taught to think of him with reverence, and admi...

The darkness that had dwelt so long in the heart of Felicita began now to cast its gloom over the whole household. A sharp attack of illness, which followed immediately upon her...

Roland Sefton had met with but few difficulties in getting clear away out of England, and there was little chance of his being identified, from description merely, by any of the...

It was as the bells of the Abbey rang for matins that the stranger died. For a few minutes Roland remained beside him, and then he called in the women to attend to the dead, and...

Every summer Phebe went down to her own home on the uplands, according to her promise to the Nixeys. Felix and Hilda always accompanied her, for a change was necessary for the c...

Roland Sefton went back to the room in which the corpse of the stranger was now lying. The women were gone, and he turned down the sheet to look at the face of the man who was a...

Phebe rode slowly homeward in the dusk of the evening, her brain too busy with the varied events of the day for her to be in any haste to reach the end. For the last four miles...

The tidings of Felicita's death spread rapidly in England, and the circumstances attending it, its suddenness, and the fact that it had occurred at the same place that her husba...

It was dark, with the pitchy darkness of a village street, where the greater part of the population were gone to bed, when he passed through Engelberg towards the hotel, where P...

But it was more difficult than Phebe anticipated to resist the urgent entreaties of Felix and Hilda not to sever the bond that had existed between them so long. Her devotion to...

In an hospital at Lucerne a peasant had been lying ill for many weeks of a brain fever, which left him so absolutely helpless that it was impossible to turn him out into the str...

Nothing could have delighted Mr. Clifford so much as a marriage between Jean Merle and Phebe Marlowe. The thought of it had more than once crossed his mind, but he had not dared...