Her evil genius

The summer holidays had begun and the great convent school was deserted, all its pupils gone but two, who were in the alcove belonging to the elder of them, and, as if that brea...

Mother Benedicta, careful of many things, had meant to add the mystery of Beryl Corselas to her burden, but fate was stronger than she, who had been for so many years the capabl...

A tall, big-boned girl in a frock too short for her had asked for laudanum for a toothache. She looked half-wild with pain--or despair; the chemist never thought of the latter,...

While Beryl Corselas slept like a dead girl in the flying railway-carriage, a woman sat in a beautiful house in London and wondered why she was remembering the strange goblin ch...

She lay on the floor, lax, inert as the dead; but her eyes were open. Where was she? What was this hard, narrow place, where a light burned dimly? She thought for one awful inst...

On the shore of St. Anne’s, that is a day’s walking from Blackpool, was the wreck of a brig. Dismantled, gaunt in the daylight, black and gruesome at night, it lay canted on the...

Mother Felicitas sat in her white-walled parlor, and her lean face looked gray against the whitewashed background from which the pictured saints and martyrs looked down indiffer...

“I never knew how much I read till now, when I have no books. Time hangs and hangs; writing this thing helps to pass it, though there is nothing to put down. I can’t think; I fe...

They had given him more trouble than anything for sixteen years, but this very elaboration of detail pleased the man. He was a very cruel person, and a very cautious one, or he...

Calm water and the stoppage of the engines roused Andria from her first sleep after a wakeful night. It was daylight, and the sun was shining. She was on deck as soon as she cou...

All through breakfast she sat like a woman whose every perception is sharpened by fear. The very ordinariness of that meal, served faultlessly by Salome and another colored woma...

Her dusky hair was dressed like Andria’s, her golden-tawny eyes shone serene in her pale face; even the crimson of her lips was brighter. For the first time in all her miserable...

In a less lonely place the governess would have thought nothing of those footsteps, but here she had been expressly told two things--there were no neighbors and there was danger...

The weather changed that afternoon. A high, hot wind blew from the southwest under a gray sky; the sea thundered on the beach below the house; and as Beryl looked out listlessly...

With a quick, backward sweep of her long, young arm Beryl Corselas sent Andria staggering backward, but she never looked to see Salome catch her dexterously and drag her inside...

Scorching morning sun on a barren point of rock and sand, and on great waves that thudded and broke emerald-green and white on the wet beach; and nothing else to tell of the pas...

Andria’s heart contracted where she sat in the pleasant, green-shaded room. The three colored women had made nothing of carrying the unconscious man into an unused room in the u...

For a fortnight he had fever, and was nursed untiringly by Salome, silent as a statue. When he had mended enough to be left alone and could walk about his room, he discovered he...

To Heriot’s utter surprise, Salome at seven o’clock brought him a message that the ladies were expecting him at dinner. It occurred to him suddenly that second thoughts had conv...

“He mustn’t find you here!” she cried. “Perhaps he has come to take us away. You must go back to the quarters till I find out what he means to do.”

And indeed she looked ill enough, and startled enough for anything, as she leaned hard on the door-handle that she might not fall. Every vestige of color had gone from her face,...

“I was busy,” Andria answered, shutting the door behind Beryl. She had been busy, indeed, and if Egerton had seen her now he would have had no fears that her beauty might be a s...

For how many years had that name been her terror, its owner her evil genius. Sometimes it had been clear even to her blinded eyes that his anger was used as a pretext for not ac...

Half from real dislike of the man, half from wanton mischief, she had dexterously slipped away from Erle and vanished like a spirit into an opening in the thick bush. Full of la...

A weakness like the lethargy that comes before death had bound Andria hand and foot. Where she had sunk down on the door-step she stayed, caring nothing for the dark shadows of...

“I’m worn out,” she thought; “I’m beginning to imagine things. It couldn’t have been Egerton’s laugh I heard, for he wouldn’t dare come here at night--and he couldn’t have known...

“Why the devil doesn’t Raimond come?” he thought, and gashed his cheek till he swore aloud, though at the same instant the door had opened on his son, a disheveled object in sil...

“Salome, I am going to shut up the house and take all the ladies away! They have gone down to the yacht already. Pack your things, and be as quick as you can, the three of you....

In the wild panic that had overtaken her, Salome ran on and on, crashing in bewilderment through the thick scrub without knowing or caring where she was going. Fat as she was, s...

Mother Felicitas sat in her straight-backed chair in her own parlor and gripped the table in front of her, as if only by holding fast to something could she keep from drifting o...

“Oh, Salome, he’s--we’re too late!” Andria, a ghostly figure enough in her torn white dressing-gown, in which she had lain down to take the sleep which had betrayed her trust, a...

How long had she lain in this hot, close cabin, hearing the endless jar of the screw and the wash of stormy water on the closed port-hole? And where was Andria?

“I never touched a hair of her head,” said the man who had merely tied her up to suffocate or be eaten. “Beryl believe me! I knew her long ago, when first she was Heriot’s--frie...

“I couldn’t help it,” said Andria, “they were too quick for me. I am slow-witted. I see now it was madness to have sent you away, and worse to send that dreadful old man after y...

Mother Felicitas grew strangely worse at Blackpool. She only stayed for a week in the quiet convent, and neither rested nor slept till she was back in her own place.

“Last autumn,” Andria looked straight at the rigid figure in the chair, “I was in London, deserted, nearly starving. A man who called himself Egerton engaged me, without a chara...

It was pouring rain. Beryl, hurried into a close carriage, had not time to see the whilom convent “boy of all work” was the driver. They drove on endlessly it seemed to the girl...

The woman would have talked to her, but she shrank away, conscious that she was a prisoner, and Mrs. Fuller one of her jailers. She saw another thing as time went on--that day a...

He was an abstemious man; his vile dinner had not troubled him. Indeed, if he had not been afraid to risk weakness, he would not have eaten a crust in this house.

She had never spoken when the woman she thought dead had run in; pale, breathlessly, but Andria herself and no ghost. She had only gazed dumfounded; then leaped with the instinc...