Convict B 14: A Novel

Raise a chapel with forms in rows Under the competent warders' eyes, That day and night search out men's privacies. God is too soft, but a warder knows How to deal with the pris...

It was Sunday morning, and all prisoners having the white Church of England ticket on their doors had been rounded up for the chapel. Not that that was any hardship, for they li...

Savage I was sitting in my house, late, lone: Dreary, weary with the long day's work: Head of me, heart of me, stupid as a stone: Tongue-tied now, now blaspheming like a Turk; W...

The Bellevue, when Gardiner first set eyes on it, was a cross between a hostelry and a farm, tumbled round three sides of a quadrangle where black-and-white pigs rooted and grun...

Sydney Wandesforde, Denis's partner, was a big, heavy-featured, heavily built man, whose appearance nobody could have called aristocratic. Plutocratic was more like it. There ha...

On the day after Denis left the Bellevue, Dorothea also departed, with her mountain of trunks. She did not see Gardiner again. Louisa paid the bill. The feelings of the rejected...

Late in February a blizzard swept over the north; it was followed by still, intense, stringent cold. By night the fogs were dense; by day the white world glittered in sunshine....

When men shall say, Peace, and all things are safe, then shall sudden destruction come upon them, as sorrow cometh upon a woman travailing with child, and they shall not escape.

Lettice, dragging up the steps of No. 33 Canning Street, paused to unfasten her waterproof and shake her wet umbrella. It was raining, it seemed to have been raining ever since...

The house was asleep. The white corridor was filled with blue reflections of the sky, from the French window open at its north end; but the blind of the south window opposite gl...

Seven years of prison doctoring had not blunted the first fine temper of Leonard Scott's sympathy. Doctors in general, even in ordinary practice, have to harden themselves or br...

In the days of her not far distant childhood Dorothea had never loved any game like hide-and-seek; she flung herself into her present escapade with much the same zest and little...

"Well, miss, Mr. Smith haven't, that's sure. I might be a sack of potatoes for all the notice he takes. Men he'll look at, and I'd be sorry to be the one as tried to do him; but...

Three days after the inquest Denis came up to town to interview a timber merchant as to a contract about which there had been a difference of opinion. He looked down on the man...

Gardiner was just one second too late. As he reached the back door the police arrived at the front; and they saw him. The Wrotham man, who had known him as a wicked small boy, r...

Ten days later, after his examination before the Borough Bench at Westby, Gardiner was committed to the February Assizes on a charge of manslaughter. Bail not being allowed, he...

The hamlet of Woodlands is near Wrotham, in the county of Kent. To reach it you must take the old Chatham and Dover at Victoria and get out at Otford, a sweet-scented village si...

Lettice, who was stooping over a new kitten which she had adopted since the departure of Geraldine, straightened herself and looked at Gardiner with a discouraging expression. T...

There is a legend which says that September is the month of the fading leaf. Townsmen may fancy so, looking at their own starved avenues, which begin to shrivel and strip themse...

In his salad days, a long time ago, Denis had fallen in love with the daughter of a respectable suburban fishmonger, after tumbling out of the sky on the roof of her house. The...

Oh! la foule joyeuse, Le soir, Autour des tables, sur les trottoirs, Et la bière mousseuse Débordant des verres, Et les longues pipes de terre Dont on suit des yeux la fumée, Le...

Under the canopy of stars Harry Gardiner lay awake thinking of his sins; among which he did not, then or later, include any responsibility for the death of Trent. It was a shock...

The inquest on the body of Major Trent, who was killed by a fall at the Easedale Hotel, Grasmere, on Thursday evening, was conducted by Dr. Ellis, coroner for Westmorland, at th...

Flying is no sport for the sluggard. The calmest hours of the twenty-four are often those before the dawn, and the earnest aviator must be ready to turn out of his warm bed at s...

The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still. They have forged our chains of being for good or ill; And their invisible hands t...

The prison gates shut. Silence fell. The troubled waters settled into calm. Tom went back to Queenstown; Mr. Gardiner to Woodlands--and to bed, with a couple of nurses in attend...

Trent lay as he had fallen, with his head on the fender, in a pool of blood which slowly enlarged itself and sopped into the carpet. The sharp edge had fractured his skull. He w...

On a cold morning in July, 1913, Lettice climbed down from a Belgian third-class carriage, dragging her luggage behind her, and found herself at Graide station, province of Luxe...

Lettice had had no tea, but she did not stay for it; she uprooted herself, setting back her chair without a sound, and flitted inconspicuously out of the exhibition. On her slow...

" ... All villages, châteaux, and houses are burnt down during this night. It was a beautiful sight to see the fires all round us in the distance. In every village one finds onl...

Lettice was darning her stockings in the shade of the tower. Lettice would have darned her stockings on the Judgment Day. She suspended her work to look up, slowly, at Dorothea....

Not so very many miles from Rochehaut, in an empty loft, Denis was studying a map spread out on a packing-case. On the other side of their table Wandesforde sat writing a letter...

At the moment when Lettice and Dorothea were sitting down to bread and salt in Canning Street, Denis was leaning over a rustic bridge in the garden of Mrs. Byrne's week-end cott...

Gardiner bought himself an outfit at a second-hand dealer's in one of the back streets off the Vauxhall Bridge Road. His plan was to ride as far as the next station before South...