Giants' bread

It was the opening night of London's new National Opera House and consequently an occasion. Royalty was there. The Press were there. The fashionable were there in large quantiti...

There were, of course, the nursemaids. Winnie, the present one, and behind her Jane and Annie and Sarah and Gladys. Those were all the ones that Vernon could remember, but there...

Winnie the nursemaid was going away. It all happened very suddenly. The other servants whispered together. Winnie cried. She cried and cried. Nurse gave her what she called a Ta...

A new nursemaid came, a thin white girl with protruding eyes. Her name was Isabel, but she was called Susan as being More Suitable. This puzzled Vernon very much. He asked Nurse...

Vernon woke, after a long time, to find himself in bed. It was, of course, the natural place to be when you woke up, but what wasn't natural was to have a great hump sticking up...

The years from five to nine remained somewhat dim in Vernon's memory. Things changed--but so gradually as not to matter. Nurse did not return to her reign over the nursery. Her...

And he began to notice a curious phenomenon. After each scene his mother looked larger and his father looked smaller. Emotional storms of reproach and invective exhilarated Myra...

Two months after his father sailed for South Africa Vernon went to school. It had been Walter Deyre's wish and arrangement, and Myra, at the moment, was disposed to regard any w...

The friendship with Sebastian Levinne prospered and throve apace. Half the zest of it lay in the secrecy that had to be adopted. Vernon's mother would have been horrified if she...

The room was full of cigarette smoke. It eddied and drifted about, forming a thin blue haze. Through it came the sound of three voices occupied with the betterment of the human...

A subtle depression always weighed down Vernon's spirits as he got near Carey Lodge. He hated the house, hated its solid comfort, its thick bright-red carpets, its lounge hall,...

It couldn't be true--it _couldn't_! And yet, after all, hadn't Mr. Flemming said very much the same, years ago? Yes, but then there had been the magic words "twenty-one" to look...

Nell nodded apathetically. She was sitting on the arm of a chair, not yet dressed. Her golden hair hung in a stream over the pale pink kimono she was wearing. She looked very lo...

They faced each other desperately, bewildered by this sudden rift between them--by the queer unexpected vagaries of life. One minute they had been so near that each thought even...

Nell was relieved by her mother's attitude. She had feared recriminations, reproaches. Insensibly she always shrank from harsh words or any kind of scene. Sometimes she thought...

August was a difficult month for Vernon. Nell and her mother were in Dinard. He wrote to her and she to him, but her letters told him little or nothing of what he wanted to know...

"I like coming to see you, Jane," said Sebastian. "You never treat me as a bloated young Jew to whom only the flesh pots of the Savoy would make appeal."

Nell was back in London. Vernon came up to see her the day after her return. She noticed the change in him at once. He looked haggard, excited. He said abruptly:

Nell's sweetness and encouragement were like manna to him at this time. She had that wonderful instinct for always saying the words he longed to hear. But for her, as he constan...

On a day in July Sebastian Levinne walked along the Embankment in the direction of Jane's flat. It was a day more suggestive of early spring than of summer. A cold wind blew the...

Sebastian read and reread the brief note. He was at his mother's house on a few days' leave, so it had reached him with no delay. Across the breakfast table he was conscious of...

Nell went to see Mrs. Curtis, the Red Cross commandant. Mrs. Curtis was benign and affable. She was enjoying her importance and was convinced that she was a born organizer. Actu...

A memorial service was held for Vernon in the little old church at Abbotsford under the shadow of Abbots Puissants, as it had been held for his father. The two last of the Deyre...

In the town of A---- in Holland, not far from the German frontier, is an inconspicuous inn. Here on a certain evening in 1917 a dark young man with a haggard face pushed open th...

In the yard of the county hotel in Wiltsbury two chauffeurs were busy with cars. George Green finished his work on the interior of the big Daimler, wiped his hands on a bit of o...

Sebastian Levinne was in his office going into the details of a ticklish contract when a telegram was brought to him. He opened it carelessly, for he received forty or fifty tel...

Sebastian gave his name and said he was sure Mrs. Chetwynd would see him. He was shown into the drawing room to wait. The room seemed empty and silent but unusually luxurious--v...

She looked very tall. Nell cowered down on the sofa. Jane had a wicked face--she had always thought so. There was a look on her face now as of an avenging Fury.

Her hair had grown--it was arranged in two short plaits, one over each shoulder. Her face was horribly thin, with a high hectic flush on each cheek bone. The bones of her should...