Life, the Interpreter

“BUT the extraordinary thing is that it has happened!” The lady who seemed a victim of this surprise lay back in her luxurious chair and exhibited a small foot on the fender.

MURIEL DALLERTON knelt on the floor of a small lodging-house room by the fire. It was with evident difficulty that she could make it burn at all, for the soot kept rolling down...

“YOU are quite right in thinking I care for her, Mrs. Huntly, and have done ever since I knew her,” said Jack Hurstly, looking hard at an inoffensive poker. “But there’s no doin...

THE club room, large and bare, with a bench or two and one long table, was full of girls, though at first glance you might not have been inclined to call them so. They were all...

“My God, I would not live, save that I think this gross, hard-seeming world Is our misshapen vision of the Powers behind the world that make our griefs our gains.”

“YOU have not come to see me for some time, Jack, yet we used to be good friends once, didn’t we? One seems to have one’s seasons for those kind of things, then they drop out. W...

THE short June days soon came to an end, and Muriel found them none too short, for warmth can only be enjoyed by the luxurious, and her life at present was anything but that.

“Sunday,” said Edith le Mentier, lazily swaying her parasol, “does my religion for me. When I hear the sweet church bells chiming over the cow-laden fields I say to myself this...

MURIEL had not in the least intended to find herself alone with Jack Hurstly in a canoe. It all happened so naturally that protests and excuses were out of the question. She loo...

“O Heart! O blood that freezes! blood that burns! Earth’s returns for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin: Shut them in; with their triumphs and the glories and the rest— L...

THE morning brought counsel to Muriel. She would say nothing. Jack would not return for a year or two, and in the meantime Gladys’ passionate little heart might have turned else...

THERE was a high west wind, and the dust swirled in clouds at the street corners. It was the kind of wind that never lets one alone, and is constantly drawing attention to the i...

The weather in the opening charm of June would to most people have been better spent in the country; only London lovers felt the greater charm of the full, bright season set in...

“REALLY, Gladys,” said Mary Huntly firmly, “I think you should give some reason for the way you are behaving. I don’t want to bother you, but there was my own brother, Cyril——”

“I HOPE, my dear,” said Mrs. le Mentier, “that I am not too frightfully out of place. But the fog drove me to you—it positively did. Mystery is so more-ish, and you know how dre...

IT was a day when all hope of spring was left behind—withered in a black northeaster—when every one unfortunate enough to be in England longs for the south of France, and every...

PEOPLE whom everybody considers tender-hearted and good-natured do not like to wake up to the fact that they are neither. It takes a good deal to wake them up to it, and they ar...

“You and I have always been good friends, and though I have never said anything to you about your trouble over Jack Hurstly it has not been because I have not felt for you. I th...

LESLIE went back to the studio bewildered. She had sent him away without excuses. He wondered blankly what he was being punished for, and why she was denied him in the present;...

That “certain twilight” moment was already beginning to “cut the glory from the gray,” and across the Indian garden strolled two figures scarcely conscious of the breathless lif...

When dinner was over she sang softly to Jim, letting her eyes rest on him with a light caressing smile. Her own world had turned to paradise. She was playing with sunbeams on a...

DESPERATION, when it does not rave, becomes a calm; and it was with an almost listless quiet that Cynthia, sitting opposite her brother in his office, told him she was going away.

MURIEL read Cynthia’s letter wonderingly. It was short, and merely contained her reasons for leaving Muriel for six months at least. By the end of that time Leslie Damores would...

“REALLY, Mary, it’s absurd to stay away from the picnic! And I simply can’t go if you won’t. That odious Mrs. Collins makes the most hateful chaperon, with her ‘Come here, my de...

WHEN Tom Huntly rode home with a big bag of game after a satisfactory dinner with a crony it was nearly twelve o’clock. Yet to his surprise the whole house was lit up, and there...

“TOO late!” is a phrase holding the eternal knell of life. It sounds like a muffled peal even to those who hear it lightly said. To those who have lived through it, the worst of...

GLADYS went into the garden, where it was coolest and shadiest, and sat, a lovely and pathetic figure, leaning, it is true, against a cushion with her listless hands in her lap.

JIM looked at his uncle and said nothing. The two men were smoking on the piazza. It was late evening, the day before Major Huntly was to sail for England. He had just mentioned...

They separated after the dear, delicious lightness of the earliest French meal, one to go to the studios and try to get a skilled but unpractised hand in again, the other whimsi...

DR. GRANT had not found the wrench of parting much easier than his sister, but, like many people with deep emotions, he had found room enough to keep his unhappiness apart from...

This brief but characteristic epistle rung in Muriel’s head as she left the club for the night. It was a trying time to leave the work. She had almost a settlement now of new he...

MURIEL woke up to a new poverty and an extra ten thousand a year. The latter scarcely passed through her mind, but the former made her terribly lonely. Now there seemed nothing...

IT was early, and the sunlight with sharp shadows had a chilly and almost stage effect. The sky was dazzling over Notre Dame. Geoffrey Grant sat in the great church, watching th...

HE had found her! He repeated breathlessly to himself the one great fact. Leslie Damores had searched all their old haunts in Paris, had wandered and waited and watched, and now...

GLADYS was desperately unhappy. She had got what she wanted, and that, unfortunately, is frequently what follows. The unscrupulous get much, but they lose more; and Gladys, who...

“SO Launcelot is to go to school, and Cynthia is to be married, and you are to be left all alone?” asked Muriel smiling as she handed Geoff a cup of tea. She had handed him a go...

“THE worst of being unusual,” said Edith le Mentier to Jack as he talked with her under the cover of loud, unmeaning drawing-room music, “is—that’s it’s so common. Really you kn...

THERE was trouble at Shindies Alley, not that there was anything unusual in that! For it was a place where trouble was the commonplace, and what the comfortable call tragedy alm...

THE studio lamps made cheerful colors in the right places, and Cynthia feeling the world as far as she was concerned in her lap, in the shape of a baby boy, round and fair with...

It was a cold day, and he looked aggressively warm and reassuring. He never needed to be made allowances for, and Muriel could never quite forgive him that. She had made so many...