Paths of Judgement

A cold, evening sky was over London as Geoffrey and Felicia drove through wet squares and streets. Here, too, the storm had lifted, and between its darkness and the darkness of...

Felicia stood at the window looking from the hill-top over the rain-dimmed country. It was early afternoon and in the steady grey, unbroken by a cloud, high over the grey land t...

Felicia received the letter on that early spring morning, and after the weeks of anguish and humiliating fear felt, with all her despair, the exquisite relief of pity. When he h...

Angela Bagley wore her idealism with conviction, so at home in it that she only saw herself dressed in its becoming lines and colours. But it was an idealism purely intellectual...

"Yes, it had become impossible," said Geoffrey. He was standing before her in the little room overlooking the river where they so often talked. "I couldn't submit to being dragg...

Mrs. Cuthbert Merrick looked about the little room with a scrutiny cautious and acute. Almost a year had passed since Felicia's marriage, but the summer and winter had been a pr...

That evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. "Will you come to me,"--the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an arrow--"and repeat to me the calumn...

"What ages it is, Maurice, since we have really talked together!" said Angela. Maurice, indeed, had avoided meetings all the spring, and Felicia's unexpressed reluctance had mad...

The wonderful week seemed, as it receded into the past, to gain in wonder, to irradiate the present with ever-deepening meaning. Everything was beautiful; all relations beautifi...

While Maurice moved from country house to country house, this migratory season, stretching on until the late autumn, he found it easy to keep his spirits in the golden-haze atmo...

Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the dusty road, and when the hill-top...

Geoffrey, on getting back to London, wired to Maurice that he must see him at once, and at about nine Maurice appeared in his rooms. It was a Saturday night, and Geoffrey was free.

The news of Geoffrey's resignation of office was a tonic to Maurice's new energy. It spurred him to fuller deserving of such sacrifice. He finished the portrait over which he ha...

"You and Mr. Wynne seem to be great friends, Felicia," Mrs. Merrick said to her niece on the following day. She was laying the papers and magazines on a small table in more even...

Geoffrey and Angela had a common ancestor from whom her father and his mother were descended. This person, in the reign of George III, was an obscure country solicitor, who, thr...

The talk had been as suave as the ascent of a rocket; and once its destined height attained its transformation into successive explosive shocks swiftly followed. Felicia, shortl...

Mrs. Merrick's drawing-room overflowed with aesthetic intentions. Such intentions had come to her late in life, and, as a result, Middle Victorian warred with Morris and final,...

There must be no more evasions. Felicia must see how much she counted with him, must recognize him as her champion, though championship might endanger more than he could allow h...

Felicia was up early in the morning after her arrival, and while she made a leisurely toilet she was thinking, smiling as she thought, about the last evening. An altogether nove...

And Angela? This was Maurice's first waking thought. In the bewildered joy and gratitude of the night before he had put Angela aside with the thankful reflection that Lord Glast...

Felicia did not regret; she accepted the fact of an achieved happiness almost as unquestioningly as Maurice; but there had been for her a phase of questioning and readjustment,...

He had no right to ask it, and yet Maurice thought of it persistently and the next morning ushered in a most auspicious comment on such thoughts. He received quite a solid chequ...

The spring and summer were over and autumn already growing bleak when Geoffrey one afternoon drove to Chelsea. He drove there often, on his free Wednesdays and Saturdays, since...

Angela walked away breathing quickly. Her exaltation still floated her above her anger, but through the anger and through the exaltation a deep sense of injury and humiliation r...

"Geoffrey, dear old boy, walk home with me, will you?" On the steps, after seeing Felicia and her friend into their carriage, Maurice put his hand through Geoffrey's arm. "I've...

Austin Merrick had begun life inauspiciously. The younger son of an unimportant country squire, he had been none of the things which a younger son should be, neither industrious...

Mrs. Merrick sent a cart for her niece's box next morning, and Felicia set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy...

Maurice and Felicia walked along the lane where they had first met; she was going home and he to go that evening. It was a farewell walk. On the hill-top, in the garden he was a...

Only one other person passed along the lonely sunny road that afternoon--the Rev. Charles Godersham, rector of the charming little Gothic church--where Mr. Merrick, emphasis in...

Mr. Merrick, when Maurice had gone, made no reference to his own expulsion, and faced his daughter at meals in frigid silence. They saw little of each other now. Felicia was bus...

"WHAT did you and Angela have to say to one another?" Maurice asked. He and Felicia were driving down the polished sweep of Piccadilly alone, for Mr. Merrick disliked crowded ha...