Hepplestall's

RUPERT was annoyed, and annoyed with himself for being annoyed, when he drove up to the main gate of Staithley Mills on the following afternoon and found that the gate-keeper di...

THE best that could be said about the Wheatsheaf Hotel at Staithley Bridge was very good indeed; it was that when a certain eminent actor-manager was appearing in Manchester, he...

He had; that was the worst of women; an agent sweated blood to make a woman into a star, and the thankless creature manned and retired. But Mary had not immediately retired and...

IT is not to be gainsaid that Tom Bradshaw heard of the flight of Mary Ellen with relief. “I don’t know if I’m a doubting Thomas: I’m sure I’m a doubting Quixote,” had been his...

RUPERT lay in bed morosely contemplating the first fact about Leave--its brutal elasticity. If he did not know, on the one hand, what he had done to deserve the acquaintanceship...

IF there is a man whose job I’ve never envied, it’s the A Prince of Wales,” groaned Rupert Hepplestall, looking in his mirror with an air of cynical boredom and fastening white...

RUPERT in the office had been all that Mary had dared to hope, and that was the danger of it. She watched him almost distrusting her eyes as she might have watched a sudden conv...

IT is said that the Chinese use a form of torture consisting in the uninterrupted dripping, drop by drop, of water on the head of a victim who eventually goes mad. Mrs. Verners,...

IF some one idiosyncratic and original, some one bold to challenge the accepted order, had dared to put Mary Arden on her defense, if it had been asked what she was doing in the...

THE rigorous theory that a Hepplestall was instantly prepared at the word of command to go to the ends of the earth in the interests of the firm was, in practice, softened by ex...

A MAN with a foot in two camps is likely to be welcomed in neither and to be lonely in his life. The cotton manufacturers had grown rich, they were established, they were a new...

EDWARD’S “fat elephant” drove from Hepplestall’s meditating his retort to Reuben’s intransigeancy. He held that it was necessary to weld the manufacturers into a solid phalanx o...

TO know one’s duty and to do it are often different things. Sir Harry’s duty, as he knew, was to regard his wild oats as sown, to marry Dorothy, and to go home quietly to Lancas...

IF Hepplestall calculated much, which is a damnable vice in youth, it is possibly some consolation to know that he miscalculated the effect upon the county of his plunge, for at...

THE room held a grand piano, a great fire and two men of fifty who were playing chess. The stout, bullet-headed man with the mustache which did not conceal the firmness of his m...

PHOEBE made all reasonable, and a few indulgent, allowances for the weaknesses of manflesh, but when she awoke to the knowledge that John had not been home all night, she was do...

ONCE upon a time, a West Indian slave owner was in conversation with three master-spinners and they spoke of labor conditions in the North of England. “Well,” he said, “I have a...

WHEN Edward came home on the day of his introduction to the factory, Dorothy met him with an anxious, “Well, Edward?” and, “Oh, Mother,” he had said, “I have to think of this. P...

MR. LUKE VERNERS put on his boots in his lodging in Albemarle Street, St. James, in a very evil mood. He was in London, and ordinarily liked to be in London although it was a pl...

MARY ELLEN heard with trepidation that there was a Mrs. Butterworth on the premises; she was old enough to know that it was one thing to “get round” two men, and another to coze...

THAT night ended, as the nights of such gatherings were wont to end, with some safely, others precariously horsed, others bundled unceremoniously by Sir Harry’s servants into co...

EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall was young there was a variety of re...