Flower o' the Peach

She nodded comprehendingly, and he found a stimulant in her quiet interest. He had not Paul's tense absorption in the harvest of the eye, but he would have been no Boer had the...

"I 'm an invalid," said Margaret placidly. "A crock, you know. I 've got to take what chances I can find of doing things. But it 's no use explaining such a thing as this. If yo...

"Then--" he rose, and in another pair of moments Margaret was outside the study door in the hall, where Mrs. Jakes, affecting to be concerned in the arrangement of the furniture...

Margaret's eyes followed the big black finger to where a bunch of aloe plumes lay between the candles on the white cloth, brilliantly red. The sight of them startled the girl sh...

Mr. Samson blew noisily. "Evolution 's not in my line," he said. "It 's all very well to drag in Darwin and all that but black and white don't mix and you can't get away from th...

"Yes; a long way." He was not smiling now. "It is seven months since I left London," he said; "and already it seems dim and unreal. It's as if I 'd dreamed about it and only rem...

"Oh, yes," Margaret made haste to correct him. "I did know. But I didn't care and I don't care now. I 'm not going to take that kind of thing into account at all. I won't be bul...

At three o'clock in the morning it was still dark, though in the east, low down and gradual, there paled an apprehension of the dawn. From the driving-seat of the high two-wheel...

"Perhaps you 're right," she answered. "I 've been thinking something of the kind myself. A letter I had--from a girl at home--put it in my mind. She writes me six sheets all ab...

The room was oppressively hot with a sickening closeness in its atmosphere and a war of smells pervading it. The desk had whisky bottles, several of them, all partly filled, sta...

He spoke in tones as matter-of-fact as he could make them, for his professional eye told him that the woman was at the limit of her endurance and could support no further surpri...

And yet the truth of it was, a connoisseur in girls could have matched Miss Vivie Sinclair a hundred times over, so little was there in her that was peculiar or rare. The connoi...

Fat Mary was asleep in the armchair, gross and disgustful, and he woke her with the heel of his slipper on her big splay foot. She squeaked and came to life angrily and reported...

Poor Mrs. Jakes! Seven thousand miles from the streets of Clapham Junction, an exile from the cheeriness and security of its little decent houses, she held yet with a frail hand...

They looked at each other. Bailey still sitting on the floor, she on her knees, and each read in the other's eyes an appraisement and a stratagem. The coffee-pot that stood all...

The face heaved and rose and lifted to corroborate it the cast-off clothes of Christian du Preez, enveloping the person of Boy Bailey. He shuffled to a sitting position on the e...

It was a vexation that abode with him that night and through the next day; it kept him from the sincere repose which is the right of straightforward and uncompromising minds, wh...

"I see," said Margaret. "I was afraid at first that you were sick of me too, Paul. I needn't have been afraid of that, need I? Wouldn't it be fine if we could meet in London?"

They were at the top of a gentle slope, so gradual that it had made no break in the flat prospect of ten minutes ago, and before them, and still so far off that it had the appea...

The queer little scene was sufficiently clear to him. He understood it entirely. The Boer, face to face with an emergency for which his experience and his training prescribed no...

"Fancy," exclaimed the tramp softly. "But it was a great game, a great game. Sometimes, even now, I sort of miss it. And the funny thing is--it is n't the grub and the girls and...

These two she read at the breakfast table, drinking from her coffee-cup between the bottom of one sheet and the top of the next, savoring them for a vintage gone flat and perish...

He sat back to give her room to look. She had in her time spent sincere days at one of the art schools which help Kensington to its character and was prepared to appreciate expe...

"On the --th of this month, man discovered weeping and disorderly on the platform at Zeekoe Siding, stated to Corporal Simms that he had been robbed of five hundred pounds by co...

It was late in the afternoon when the sheep moved off, and the west was full of the sunset. They flowed out from the cactus-ringed fold like a broadening trickle of milk, with t...

There was a fidgety interval before the big cart drove up to the house, its wheels rending through the gritty mud and its horses steaming as though they had been boiled. Mr. Sam...