Despair's Last Journey

‘Thirst is now assuaged,’ he said solemnly at the end of his third deep tumbler, ‘and a man may begin to enjoy himself. There ought to be a boy here who can make a cocktail.’

Armstrong and Paul were keeping house alone, and were playing chess together. The big eight-day clock ticked, the cat purred noisily on Armstrong’s shoulder, the clear burning f...

Miss Belmont, nine-and-twenty, fresh and fair, ignorant-clever (after the known feminine fashion), _rusée_ to the finger-tips, with a dragon reputation for virtue and a resolute...

Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A sound of laughter drew him to the...

The damp, river-scented earth slipped under his feet. The blare of a steam clarion, and the bang of a steam-driven drum, sounded, and the naphtha lamps of the merry-go-round and...

The first hint of memory showed a hearth, a fire, and a woman sitting in a chair with an outstretched finger. An invisible hand bunched his petticoats behind, and at his feet wa...

There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going England, on whose John Bull qualit...

That year winter had advanced with a delaying foot thus far across the Belgian Ardennes, but this was the hour chosen by the icy king for the beginning of his real siege of that...

For any and every episode of his life save this, Paul, when he chose to think about it, could make a fairly expressive picture in his mind, and could bring back something of the...

The work thus abruptly begun lasted for weeks, and Darco’s enthusiasm drove Paul before it as if it had been a hurricane. Pauer lounged for a day or two, and then betook his gol...

It was mid-July, and even at an altitude of four thousand feet the sun could scorch at noonday. The lonely man sat at his outlook, gazing down the valley. There was a faint haze...

Here, in the wakeful night, high up in the monstrous hills, with this everlasting torrent raging in his ears, and the camp-fire out of doors there flaring, flickering, glowing,...

The evening was memorable to Paul for many reasons. There was not a great deal of the talk to carry away with one; but if it had not the solid brilliance of the diamond, it had...

The voice of the river spoke from the great gorge in accents of exultation and despair, and the voice was a part of the primeval silence, as it had been from the moment when the...

Paul Armstrong--the real Paul Armstrong who dreamed these dreams of memory--sat day by day in his mountain solitude surrounded by the smoke-fog which obliterated all but the nea...

And who should be La Femme Incomprise but Madame la Baronne de Wyeth, a lady more or less known to fame in two continents, but whom the unwitting Paul had not yet so much as hea...

Darco’s work fell into routine for a time. The wheels of all his affairs went so smoothly that he and his assistant found many easy breathing-spaces. But Paul was of a mind just...

The Dreamer dreamed, and the dream showed the old ramshackle, bankrupt printing-office at Castle Barfield again. Paul was back there. The thing had happened with a strange in-ev...

There are just as many different ways of falling in love as there are characters and temperaments, and even the same man--unless he be a fellow of no originality--will not fall...

By far the greater part of the theoretical wisdom of the world comes to us in the shape of legacies bequeathed by fools. A fool is not a person without knowledge or understandin...

The company played a week within five miles of Castle Barfield, and Paul snatched an hour for home. There the brown velveteen and the patent leathers and the watch made a great...

Paul knew that Madge and he were to have a travelling companion on the voyage, and that the companion was to be Madge’s sister, but he did not meet her until he stepped aboard t...

Claudia’s introduction served so well that Paul was allowed to show what he was made of in rehearsal at the Mirror Theatre, with a prospective salary of fifty shillings a week....

Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man. He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read ‘Don Juan,’ and had learned a thing or two. He conceived...

Ralston was on the scene--Ralston in ripe middle age, massive and short of stature, with a square head and a billowy, sable-silvered head of hair; full lips, richly shadowed by...

It would appear that in the course of time Gertrude grew a little tired of Paul’s ceaseless devotion. It is quite likely that she sometimes found him in the way, and she was dep...

Paul survived. He left the church, and returned with a doubtful allegiance to Ebenezer. He joined the singing-class there, for his voice had suddenly grown harsh and deep, and h...

If a philosopher were set to describe the best and the worst of life, he would certainly have a considerable choice before him. But amongst the best he would have to set down lo...

‘No man knows the sex. Women are like Tennyson’s description of the law--a wilderness of single instances; but except for those surprising examples which are detected for us onl...

In a month’s time from this Paul’s soul sat chuckling all day long. He lived with the quaintest set he had ever conceived, and there was no page of ‘Nickleby’ which was fuller o...