Mad Barbara

“Take it, or turn me out of the door. I hold to your good-will and your trust with all my heart, but live on you I will not, just because I happened to pull the youngster out of...

Her courage and her will had gone, and a storm of trembling shook her. John Gore felt the quivering of her body coming along her arms to him. Her hands strained at his, as thoug...

My lord took his first walk in the kitchen of Thorn leaning upon John Gore’s shoulder, the son’s arm about the father’s body. Any one who had seen the pair would have judged the...

They rode out through the gate and over the bridge of tree-trunks with a vague, black gleam of water on either side. They had hardly crossed when the gate was slammed on them, a...

Chris Jennifer’s wife, looking up from time to time at her “little lady,” could see that Barbara was listening for something beyond the mere roar of the wind in the chimney and...

“Yes. After all, it may not concern you much—at least—I trust not. We all have our little impulses, our chance inclinations. Do you remember, Jack, something I said to you in th...

It was Mrs. Jael who came out with a tinder-box and lit the candles in the music-room. Barbara watched her through the window, noticing, almost unconsciously, the woman’s double...

John Gore put the ring upon his finger, mounted his horse, and made for the main road. He needed a place where he could lie quiet, and people whom he could trust, and Furze Farm...

John Gore saw that the boy was likely to drown, and, vaulting out of the saddle, he broke through the hedge and reached the pond. The pool looked too dark and deep for wading, a...

What with misery of mind and body, the _malaise_ of the fever, and the utter melancholy of the place, my lord’s manhood and his moral courage were in ruins within a week. He gav...

Barbara’s white face seemed near to tragedy as she gazed steadily into the mirror on the wall. Every fibre of her heart had been strung to a tenseness that made each heart-beat...

John Gore ran his hands along the plinth, feeling for the main stems of the ivy where they had lifted and cocked the flagstones of the terrace. These stems were stout and tough...

She looked up at him almost timidly, as though conscious of his nearness and the homage in his eyes. It had been dark at the tower window, but now they saw each other in the lig...

Perhaps what he saw was this: a man bred in luxury, a bon-vivant, a lover of pleasure, thrown down, broken into a species of dark pit where the mere physical miseries of existen...

Now John Gore dreamed a quaint dream the last night that he lay at Shirleys in the very room where his mother had died. He dreamed that he was at sea again, and sitting in the s...

My lord’s second cousin, my Lady Marden, a fat, happy woman eternally on the verge of laughter, shook the large green fan that ladies used then in the place of a parasol.

With the coming of winter there had been strange happenings at the Purcells’ house in Pall Mall, for my lady had died the night after Stephen Gore’s going, with no one to comfor...

The spirit of unrest that seemed in the blood of every man that year might well have entered into John Gore’s mood as he wandered without purpose in the park after leaving my La...

Barbara Purcell stood alone by the window, her eyes fixed upon the torches that were spitting and flaring in the rain. The salon had been emptied of its wits and gallants, as th...

“Oh yes, sir. Won’t you come in and dine? There is a good joint of roast, Mr. John, sir, and a barrel of oysters. My lord is at Lady Purcell’s in Pall Mall.”

Barbara, kneeling there, fed the mouse with crumbs, and ate some mouthfuls of the bread herself. For there was nothing for her to do at Thorn but to watch for this friend at dus...

“If my Lady Purcell had said that my Lady Marden painted her face, it was no business of her brother’s to repeat it, and that only fools made mischief wantonly.”

“Your pardon, but it is my concern for the child. I’ve started awake at night thinking I heard her cry out, and I have dreamed of seeing her in her shroud.”

In the little music-house in his garden overlooking the Park of St. James’s, Sir Lionel Purcell—Knight—lay dead, with his cloak half thrown across his face and one hand still gr...

Barbara had not gone ten steps before she heard a slight sound behind her like the rustle of a skirt. Startled though she may have been, she betrayed nothing, but moved on with...

My lord bowed himself and took her hands, and when he had kissed them he put them reverently away from him, and stood up bravely, yet with a twitching face. John Gore had come t...