Sink or swim?

“If I hadn’t heard it from Mrs. Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who’s a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Ho...

The Lady Millicent Vavasour, whose proceedings were thus so freely commented upon by her inferiors, was the only child of the rich and potent Earl of Gillingham. That nobleman,...

The approaching marriage of Mr. John Beacham, whose family had been time out of mind one of the most respected and respectable in the entire parish of Switcham, within the bound...

It was, as I before said, the day previous to that appointed for the wedding, and Mrs. Beacham, feeling slightly bemuddled and restless, and being withal half, and only half, re...

“Mayn’t I come in, Honor? O, please let me! Mother said I might come and ask; and I’ve brought you such a many pretty flowers. We’ve been up, Teddy and I have, ever since five o...

“How like my mother to be patronising this wedding--just the thing she is certain to do! That sort of popularity costs nothing--not five shillings, or trust Milady for staying a...

Family prayers were over at the Castle. The ladies and gentlemen, who I fear were very little the better for the ceremony, and the servants, who, if they prayed at that time in...

“Stupid! How’s that?” John said. “You were never stupid at the Clays’. You were gay as a bird there, my darling. What’s come over you, my sweet one? I hope you’ve got everything...

A fortnight, minus two days, had passed since John Beacham was married, and once more, on the occasion of the return of the bride and bridegroom to their home, all Switcham was...

It would be hard to say whether gratified maternal pride or a perhaps natural jealousy was uppermost in Mrs. Beacham’s mind when she saw from her parlour window the uproarious a...

The question was Lady Millicent’s, and she asked it of her three younger children one day towards the end of May, when Arthur was absent for a few days in London, and the family...

It was now the middle of June, and Honor Beacham was undergoing the often painful process of “settling down” in her new home. The observation is no new one, that the presence of...

It was on a Sunday morning, about a fortnight after the return of the travellers, that Honor had the first serious warning of coming “difficulty” with her mother-in-law. I have...

Before the summer days had begun to shorten, and by the time that Arthur Vavasour’s evident admiration for young Mrs. Beacham had begun to make his more cool and sensible younge...

Arthur Vavasour, in all that he had said to his brother regarding the state of things at Updown Paddocks, had not willingly diverged a hair’s-breadth from the truth. It had caus...

From the time of that chance meeting, Arthur Vavasour became a very frequent visitor at the Paddocks. Ostensibly there was generally some business excuses for the “calls” that w...

The intelligence which soon after reached the Paddocks, namely, that Arthur Vavasour was about to leave Gillingham, took Honor by surprise. Not that she was ignorant of the all-...

After the departure from the neighbourhood of Arthur Vavasour, there seemed at first to be a great gap in Honor’s life. He had told her that he was going to remain a fortnight o...

Arthur Vavasour had, as the reader has already learned, found little difficulty in persuading the kind-hearted, unsuspicious man whose colossal fortune had been made in the manu...

On the 23d of July, in the year 186--, the day remarkable as that on which Arthur Vavasour reached his twenty-first birthday, crowds of people of every degree, and all, as it se...

“Well, mother, ain’t this better now than to be sitting mending stockings, and to be bothering about pickles and preserves at home?” asked genial John Beacham of his highly resp...

Many gentlemen, as I have just said--gentlemen, that is, by brevet and by prescriptive right--made themselves conspicuous that day by their open and undisguised admiration for J...