Category: Short Stories

Moth and Rust; Together with Geoffrey's Wife and The Pitfall

The Vicar gave out the text, and proceeded to expound it. The little congregation settled down peacefully to listen. Except four of their number, the "quality" in the carved Easthope pew, none of them had much treasure on earth. Their treasure for the greater part consisted of...

Chapters

14. CHAPTER XIV

The winter, that dealt so sternly with Janet, smiled on Anne. She spent Christmas in London, for the Duke was, or at least he said he was, in too delicate a state of health to g...

4. CHAPTER IV

When Anne returned to the house an hour or two later she heard an alien voice and strident laugh through the open door of the drawing-room as she crossed the hall, and she crept...

11. CHAPTER XI

Did you ever, as a child, see ink made? Did you ever watch, with wondering intentness, the mixing of one little bottle of colourless fluid--which you imagined to be pure water--...

17. PART III

The scandal smouldered for a day or two, and then raged across London like a fire. Mary stayed at home. She could not face the glare of it. She said she was ill. Her hand shook....

2. CHAPTER II

After luncheon George offered to take Janet round the gardens. Janet looked timidly at Mrs Trefusis. She did not know whether she ought to accept or not. There might be etiquett...

6. CHAPTER VI

It was a little after twelve as Janet entered the central hall, and the salvage men were coming down for their dinner. A cord had been stretched across the foot of the grand sta...

5. CHAPTER V

"Tous les hommes sont menteurs, inconstants, faux, bavards, hypocrites, orgueilleux, ou lâches, méprisables et sensuels: toutes les femmes sont perfides, artificieuses, vaniteus...

10. CHAPTER X

It was hard on Stephen that when he walked into a certain drawing-room the following evening he should find Anne there. It was doubly hard that he should have to take her in to...

15. PART I

Lady Mary Carden sat near the open window of her blue and white boudoir looking out intently, fixedly across Park Lane at the shimmer of the trees in Hyde Park. It was June. It...

9. CHAPTER IX

It was a summer night, hot and still, six weeks later, towards the end of July. Through the open windows of a house in Hamilton Gardens a divine voice came out into the listenin...

12. CHAPTER XII

The storm had fallen on Janet at last. She saw it was a storm, and met it with courage and patience, and without apprehension as to what so fierce a hurricane might ultimately d...

8. CHAPTER VIII

It was not until Janet was sitting alone in the room she had taken at an hotel that her dazed mind began to recover itself. It did not recoil in horror from the remembrance of t...

7. CHAPTER VII

The key would not turn, and for one sickening moment, while she wrenched clumsily at it, she feared she was not going to succeed in opening the cabinet. Janet had through life a...

16. PART II

"Ah! woe that youth should love to be Like this swift Thames that speeds so fast, And is so fain to find the sea,-- That leaves this maze of shadow and sleep, These creeks down...

3. CHAPTER III

Janet's mother had died when Janet was a toddling child. It is observable in the natural history of heroines that their mothers almost invariably do die when the heroines to who...

1. CHAPTER I

The Vicar gave out the text, and proceeded to expound it. The little congregation settled down peacefully to listen. Except four of their number, the "quality" in the carved Eas...

13. CHAPTER XIII

There are long periods in the journey of life when "the road winds uphill all the way." There are also long periods when the dim plain holds us, endless day after day, till the...