If Winter Comes

To take Mark Sabre at the age of thirty-four, and in the year 1912, and at the place Penny Green is to necessitate looking back a little towards the time of his marriage in 1904...

Thus, by easy means of the garrulous Hapgood, appear persons, places, institutions; lives, homes, activities; the web and the tangle and the amenities of a minute fragment of hu...

One nature? In the fifth year of their married life thoughts of her and of the poignant and tremendous adventure on which they were embarked together were no longer possible whi...

Mabel was two years younger than Sabre, twenty-five at the time of her marriage and just past her thirtieth birthday when the separate rooms were first occupied. Her habit of su...

The Penny Green Garden House Development Scheme was begun in 1910. In 1908, the year of the measles and the separated bedrooms, no shadow of it had yet been thrown. It never occ...

The other end of the daily bicycle ride, the Tidborough end, provided no feats of cycling interest. The extremely narrow, cobbled thoroughfare in which the offices of Fortune, E...

Mabel called Sabre's school textbooks "those lesson books." After she had thus referred to them two or three times he gave up trying to interest her in them. The expression hurt...

Sabre, ambling his bicycle along the pleasant lanes towards Tidborough one fine morning in the early summer of 1912, was met in his thoughts by observation, as he topped a rise,...

Sabre found but little business awaiting him when he got to his office. When he had disposed of it he sat some little time staring absent-mindedly at the cases whereon were rang...

The free-wheel run down into Perry Green landed him a little short of his gate,--not bad! Pirrip, the postman, whom he had passed in the bicycle's penultimate struggles, overtoo...

Nona! But he was not really surprised. He had taken no notice of her letter. He had wanted to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not been. When two days passed and still...

But it was October before he asked her to explain them. The Tybars, as he learnt when next he met her, a week after her visit to the office, were only at Northrepps for a breath...

A draper occupied the premises opposite Fortune, East and Sabre's. On the following afternoon, just before five o'clock, Sabre saw Nona alight from her car and go into the drape...

He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden unbridling of his bridled passions, to grapple his mind back from its wild and passionate desires and from its am...

But life goes on without the smallest regard for individual preoccupations. You may take up what attitude you like towards it or, with the majority, you may take up no attitude...

It much affected his relations with those nearest to him,--with Mabel, with Mr. Fortune, and with Twyning. In those months, and in the months following, the year changing and ad...

Towards the end of July there was some particularly splendid excitement for the newspaper-reading public. Ireland provided it; and the newspapers, as the events enlarged one upo...

He approached Penny Green and realised for the first time the hard pace at which he had been riding. And realised also the emotions which subconsciously had been driving him alo...

Things began one day very shortly after the declaration of war when, passing the barracks on his way home, Sabre was accosted and taken into the Mess by Cottar, a subaltern of t...

Came Christmas by which, at the outset, everybody knew it would be over, and it was not over. Came June, 1915, concerning which, at the outset, he had joined with Mr. Fortune, T...

Up in his room he began a long letter to Nona, pouring out to her all his feelings about this second rejection. He was writing to her--and hearing from her--regularly and freque...

He was alone in the room where Mrs. Perch lay,--not even Effie. One o'clock. This war! He had thought to shut it away for a night, and here was the inconceivable occupation to w...

Life, when it takes so giant a hand in its puppet show as to upturn a cauldron of world war upon the puppets, may be imagined biting its fingers in some chagrin at the little re...

Said Hapgood--that garrulous Hapgood, solicitor, who first in this book spoke of Sabre to a mutual friend--said Hapgood, seated in the comfortable study of his fiat, to that sam...

"All right. That was two months ago. Last week I was down at Tidborough again. Felt I'd got rather friendly with old Sabre on my last visit so as soon as I could toddled off to...

"Now, I'll tell you. Old Sabre--by Jove, it's frightful. He's crashed. The roof's fallen in on him. He's nearly out of his mind. I don't like it. I don't like it a bit. I've onl...

Hapgood had said to his friend of the effect on Sabre of Mabel's action against him: "He's crashed. The roof's fallen in on him." And that had been Sabre's own belief. But it wa...

"Did I say to you last time, after that Brighton business, that the man had crashed, that the roof had fallen in on him? Did I say that? May I never again use superlatives till...

"I'm telling you, old man, that after the coroner had done with him, and after this Humpo, with his viprous forefinger, and his retriever tongue, and his perspiration streaming...

When that cab which Hapgood had despatched after Sabre from the coroner's court overtook its quest, the driver put himself abreast of the distracted figure furiously hobbling al...

Hapgood across the coffee cups, the liqueur glasses and the cigarettes, wagged a solemn head at that friend of his, newly returned from a long visit to America. He wagged a sole...