Lantern Marsh

Mauney was seated in the green-upholstered seat of a railway car, with a ticket in his pocket marked Merlton. His baggage, consisting of a new trunk and two new leather suit-cas...

The sultry heat of the April noon rose in tremulous vibrations from the barnyard, next day, when for a moment, absolute silence prevailed. From beneath his sun-splashed hat the...

Mauney Bard did not enjoy mending fences. They were quite essential in the general economy of farming. Without them the cows would wander where they had no business, trampling p...

The story he had heard from his aunt, with its unexplained gaps, filled Mauney’s mind for days. He wondered most about what she had not told him. Her seemingly instinctive fear—...

The groundwork of Mauney’s book on history was completed, with Freda’s careful assistance, during the Christmas holidays, and finished in final form by the end of March, when th...

While Mauney waited the month for Lorna’s matrimonial verdict, he occupied himself chiefly with study and with more writing in his ledger. Whatever might be the true character o...

The next two years passed very quickly for Mauney, with few perceptible changes. The war was over. Merlton, one day, had gone crazy with armistice celebration, only to settle do...

“_I consider it most becoming and most civilized to mingle severity with good fellowship, so that the former may not grow into melancholy, nor the latter into frivolity._”—_Plin...

When he reached home, Mauney found his father talking in the kitchen with William Henry McBratney while the hired girl lay on the sofa with the cat asleep on her bosom. His fath...

Mauney did not enjoy the dinner-party. He kept looking at Freda MacDowell and wishing he had never met her. He knew, without further contemplation, that she was the most attract...

Youth is liable to misconstrue the world and its heterogeneous motives. Being inordinately eager to fulfil its own pressing missions, it is prone to belittle the halting advice...

Freda was so quiet as she and Mauney drove along the river road and so unusually unresponsive to his remarks, that he began to wonder if he had discovered her in another of her...

Mauney was sitting in Max Lee’s room after supper. These evening chats had become almost necessary. There was a time when they could both digest their evening meals downstairs i...

Mauney met Lorna Freeman the first day of college. He did not know her name at first, but she impressed him. This was partly because certain grooves, instituted that day, promis...

Mauney soon realized that, unsatisfactory as was the progress of his affair with Lorna Freeman, he was gaining some advantages from his connection with the family. Life was now...

Mauney could not sleep that night when he had returned to his room. For two hours he tossed restlessly on his bed when, finding sleep utterly impossible, he got up, put on his s...

Four weeks of the European fury had become history, but as yet the district around Beulah preserved its accustomed indifference to outside influences. In staid self-sufficiency...

Bard delayed two years before he began horse-breeding in earnest. By that time the war had become a fixture, with more promise of an endless continuance than an early peace, and...

On the first of September, when Mauney came to Lockwood to find a boarding-place and to buy a few articles of clothing before the school term began, he found everybody in ill hu...

It would always require a longer time for Mauney to become roused than for most people, in any vital matter. He would be sure to react very slowly to the irritating stimuli. He...

When Mauney arrived in Lockwood, on his way home, he completed certain reflections which had occupied him most of the day by deciding not to call upon Freda. But he found that h...

Like a flash the situation dawned on Mauney. It dawned so flashingly that he tried to hide from it all afternoon. Her impetuous nature! His own tardiness and his own misinterpre...

Freda MacDowell was one of the most remarked women who had attended the University of Merlton in recent years. First as a student, then as a departmental secretary, she had left...

The next evening Mauney called at MacDowell’s and had his first encounter with Freda’s father. He found him comfortably seated with a newspaper on the verandah. As Mauney approa...

During the first week of September Freda saw nothing of Mauney. Each day she kept expecting that he would either call or telephone. She tried to explain his delinquency by the e...

Lockwood had been called “The Garden of Upper Canada.” This designation, which scarcely over-rated the beauty of the town, originated in the private correspondence of some of it...

Freda, as may be surmised, had no sympathy with her mother’s frantic social struggle. Her father, who until five years ago, had been one of Lockwood’s chief business men, was no...

“I’m too fed up, Freda, to bother. It’s going to be a warm day and I think we ought to get out in the country, up the river some place. I’ve got a lot to talk about.”

There was a depth in Freda’s nature which she was sure no one would ever discover. A delicate fear occasionally separated her from people for an hour of tranquil meditation, in...

At noon, Mauney was too upset to eat dinner. He wanted to talk to Freda and went upstairs to wait in the alcove, until she should come up. While he sat stolidly in one of the ch...

Until the present summer Mauney had never gone back to the farm at Lantern Marsh, so that now, with his new mental outlook, he was for the first time enjoying it. William was li...

By the window of her room, opened to the river, Freda remained all the rest of the night. There was no soul near her. She watched the grey river until the moon sank, and until t...

Mauney found a boarding-house on Church Street, directly opposite the collegiate institute, a plain unit, in a plain brick terrace set close to the sidewalk. He engaged the down...

“Just a little way up Church Street, the second house past the Baptist Church. We used to live on Queen Street East, but when Charles went out West this spring—by the way, did y...

After dinner, Freda was left suddenly alone. Her mother was up the river at a bridge party on Courtney’s elegant yacht, the _Cinderella_. Her father was at home, but she felt th...

Freda returned to her home in Lockwood, advising Mauney to try for a position on the Lockwood Collegiate staff. She told him that the town had its faults, but her father, who wa...