My Lord Duke

The Home Secretary had never spent a more uncomfortable hour. His favourite daughter had stanched her tears, and gone straight to the root of the very delicate matter at issue b...

Lady Caroline Sellwood's incomparable Wednesdays were so salient a feature of those seasons during which her husband was in office, and her town house in St. James's Square, tha...

The Duke had proceeded to his hut with the slow and slouching gait of a man bemused; yet the strings of his body were as those of a lute, and there was an inordinate keen edge t...

Olivia said least. Her mother took Claude by the hand, and thanked him with real tears in her eyes, for after all she was an Irishwoman, who could be as emotional as possible wh...

It was a close night; the men were smoking their cigarettes on the terrace. Cripps was one of them; he was staying the night; he wished himself a hundred miles away. But Francis...

Nobody was about when they dismounted, so Jack himself led the horses back to the stables, while Olivia gathered up her habit and scaled the steps. The stable clock struck five...

Claude's somewhat premature despair was not justified by the event; nevertheless it did good. Excusable enough at the time, that little human outbreak was also more effective th...

It is comparatively easy to read a character from a face. This is always a scientific possibility. To fit the face to a given character is obviously the reverse. And those who k...

A dilettante in letters, a laggard in love, and a pedant in much of his speech, Claude Lafont was nevertheless possessed of certain graces of the heart and head which entitled h...

It was three o'clock in the early morning of the twentieth of August. A single jet of gas, lighting a torch in the mailed hand of a life-size man-at-arms, burnt audibly in the s...

"_I_ think of Claude," remarked his wife. "I can never tell you, Claude, how much I feel for you! We shall miss you dreadfully, of course; but we couldn't expect to enjoy oursel...

The ragged beard had been trimmed to a point; the uncouth hair had been cut, shampooed, and invested with a subtle, inoffensive aroma; and a twenty-five-shilling Lincoln and Ben...

"The Duke of St. Osmund's and Mr. Claude Lafont left town yesterday for Maske Towers, the family seat near Devenholme." So ran the announcement in the morning papers of the next...

"Yet it's astonishing how used you get to it in time--you'd be surprised! At first the whole thing knocked me sideways; it was tucker I couldn't digest. But once you take to the...

A loose chain of fairy lights marked the brink of the lake; another was drawn tight from end to end of the balustrade rimming the terrace; and between the two, incited by champa...

It was the pink of the evening when the cousins drove off in a four-wheeler with the cats on top. Claude had been in many minds about their destination, until the Duke had asked...

It was necessary to bait the horses; it was equally essential for the pair themselves to have something to eat. So they rode under the olden arch of the oak-lined Falcon, and it...

They rowed over, and were in mid-water when the landau drove up to the house. It had been sent in for Mr. Dalrymple early in the forenoon. They saw nothing, however, until they...

Lady Caroline Sellwood was delighted to find Jack in the hall on making her descent next morning. He appeared lost, however, in a gloomy admiration of the ghostly guard in armou...

Olivia was not a little tired; this was the true explanation of the tears which had driven her upstairs. It was also the one excuse she saw for herself when she thought the matt...

Her answer was altogether astonishing; she leant back in the boat and looked him full in the face. A quick flush tinged her own, and the incomparable eyebrows were raised and ar...

The health of the pair was then drunk with appropriate enthusiasm; poor Jack blurted out a few honest words, hardly intelligible from his emotion; and the three ladies left the...

The engagement became known in the course of the afternoon, and the news was received in a manner after all very gratifying to the happy pair. Lady Caroline Sellwood did indeed...