Fate Knocks at the Door: A Novel

Bedient comprehended this descent; even wondered how far down a man could go--and live. It was the first thing that ever mastered him. The temptation to leave Framtree and to ta...

He had undergone his mannish period of treason to women generally. These were the days when he believed in using force--punishing with words--"punch," he called it. This is a me...

Beth regarded him deeply for a moment. She could not adjust him to commonness. She was suffering. Bedient saw only the mystic light of that suffering. He had never loved her as...

Sensitive to such effects, he sat, musing and contemplative, when suddenly his spirit was imperiously aroused by the orchestra. The 'celli had opened the _Andante_ from the C Mi...

Bedient patted her shoulder cheerfully, and led the way along the fence through the thick greenery, until they were opposite the Club entrance. He had not known the park was eve...

"I wish you wouldn't say that," he declared earnestly. "There is nothing alive this moment, nothing in the great sun's light, that has put on such a glory of maturity. Why, you...

... So much was but a beginning. Their talk that night was all that the old Luzon nights had promised, which was a great deal, indeed.... It was not until Cairns was walking hom...

Beth laughed at the remarkable way Bedient was besieging her own studio, without appearing in person. "But Vina, you've been living like a Hindu holy man, and no one can do that...

It was hard to have known the joy of communion with his warm heart, and deeply seeing mind--and now to accept the solitude again. She felt that his going marked the end of her g...

There was a painting of Bernhardt in an upper gallery at the Club, that he had regarded with no little emotion during past days. The face of the greatest actress, so intensely f...

And now a sunburst of small but striking events. Madame Sorenson had not seen, but she launched a scream with the splash. The Chinese, squatted aft, had not seen, but like good...

"It was in New York.... I wore a white net waist and a big bunch of English violets," she said, watching him. "It seems very long ago, but it isn't--hardly ten weeks. There was...

"Dear God, how lonely He was!" Bedient said after a moment, as he regarded a picture of the Christ alone on the Mount, and the soldiers ascending to make the arrest "There were...

They did not guess, at least Cairns did not, that the low music brought tears that night--because they were in dreadful need of it, because they were filled with inner agony for...

She shivered slightly. She was dazed. Hatred for the moment, hatred for self and the world, for him, imperiously pinning her to the old sorrow; his failure to make a child of he...

The Shadowy Sister was bewitched. To her a great lover had come--a lover who had added to a boy's delicacy and beauty of ideal, a man's certainty and power. This was the trustin...

"This is your home, Wanderer," Gobind told him. "Long have you travelled to and fro and long still must you wander, but you will come back again to the cool shadows, and to thes...

And now that life had cast him into this place, Bedient found himself utterly unable to contend with the squalor of fact and mind; indeed, he was quite as ineffectual as he had...

"You know it was very foolish of me--very--to think I could make you happy, Andrew, with all these riches," he said at last, not thickly, but very low, as if he had saved streng...

In the fall of 1899, David Cairns, the youngest of the American war-correspondents, stood hungry and desolate in the plaza of the little town of Alphonso, two days' cavalry marc...

All things considered, it was rather an important affair--the party that night at the _Smilax Club_. Cairns began with the idea of asking ten people, but the more he studied Bed...

The man had but recently come in from field-work. The woman was fresh from a transport voyage from the States. He talked laughingly of the "niggers" his company had met--of smal...

And now he saw the whole road of man, from the simple consciousness of animals, through human self-consciousness, to the cosmic consciousness of prophets--and beyond to Divinity...

"You are like an Oriental," Carreras added. "Oh, they are all mad up in The States.... It's very good to have you back. I wonder why it was--that I never doubted you'd come?" He...

Rejoining the Chinese, Bedient was led to an apartment, the elegance of detail and effect of which was imperial, no less. With relief he stepped out of his riding clothes, bathe...

In speaking of the first four notes of the opening movement, Beethoven said, some time after he had finished the Fifth Symphony: "So pocht das Shicksal an die Pforte" ("Thus Fat...

Before they left the hospital, he said: "We won't speak of this to-night.... Everything is arranged.... To-morrow morning, we will come for the little boy.... It is time for us...