Tante

On a chill, sunny morning in April, Gregory Jardine went out on to his balcony before breakfast and stood leaning there as was his wont, looking down over his view. The purpling...

Mrs. Talcott sat down on the bed and Karen knelt before her with her head in her lap. The old woman's passed quietly over her hair while she wept, and the homely gentleness, lik...

Madame von Marwitz was sitting on the great terrace of a country-house in Massachusetts, opening and reading her post, as we have already seen her do. Impatient and weary as the...

He came next day and every day. They were favoured with the rarely given gift of a perfect spring. They walked along the cliffs and headlands. They sat and talked in the garden....

Madame von Marwitz sat in the deep chintz sofa with Karen beside her, and while she talked to the young couple, Karen's hand in hers, her eyes continually went about the room wi...

When the time came for going to the drawing-room, Gregory found Betty entertaining the company there, while Karen, on a distant sofa, was apparently engaged in showing her guard...

Karen and he had walked back to the house in silence, and at the door, where she stood to see him off, it had been arranged that he was to lunch at Les Solitudes next day and th...

She stood for a moment, with her hand resting on the lintel, and she surveyed an apparently unexpected audience with contemplative melancholy. If she was not pleased to find the...

On the morning that Gregory Jardine had waked from his dream, Madame von Marwitz sat at her writing-table tearing open, with an air of impatient melancholy, note after note and...

The Jardines did not come back to London till October. They had spent a month in Scotland and a month in Italy and two weeks in France, returning by way of Paris, where Gregory...

journey, had in it the look of vast, constructive power, as when, for the first time, it rested on a new piece of music, realized it, mastered it, possessed it, actual, in her m...

Six days had passed since Karen's disappearance. The country had been searched; London, still, was being examined, and the papers were beginning to break into portraits of the m...

Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in the morning. Then, after the attendant had passed along the corridor announcing lunch, and those who wer...

The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return, remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and Gregory's immunity was founded on s...

Mrs. Forrester was dispensing tea in her lofty drawing-room which, with its illumined heights and dim recesses, gave to the ceremony an almost ritualistic state. Mrs. Forrester'...

It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing ugliness. Horse-'buses plied soberly...

Karen meanwhile made her way to the cliff-path and, seating herself on a grassy slope, she clasped her knees with her hands and gazed out over the sea. She was thinking hard of...

Louise, harassed and sallow, hurried from room to room, expostulating, explaining, replying in shrill tones to Madame von Marwitz's sonorous orders. Victor, led by Mrs. Forreste...

Karen lay sleeping in the little room above. She had slept so much since they had carried her, Franz, and the two women with kind faces, into this little room; deep draughts of...

She lay and listened with a curious, cautious pleasure, like that with which, half awake, one may guide a charming dream, knowing it to be a dream. There was so much waiting to...

It was a hard, chill morning and Gregory, sauntering up and down the platform at Euston beside the open doors of the long steamer-train, felt that the taste and smell of London...

Karen did not go to her room. She was afraid that Mrs. Talcott would come to her there. She asked the cook for a few sandwiches and going to one of the lower terraces she found...

Mrs. Talcott had a broken night and it was like a continuation of some difficult and troubled dream when she heard the voice of Mercedes saying to her: "Tallie, Tallie, wake up....

Gregory heard no word of the revealing talk; yet, when he and Karen were alone, he was aware of a new chill, or a new discretion, in the atmosphere. It was as if a veil of ice,...

"Dear Mr. Jardine,--How very, very kind of you. I could hardly believe it when Mrs. Talcott told me that a box was here for me. I could think of nothing to explain it. Then when...

The first of Madame von Marwitz's great concerts was given on Friday, and Karen spent the whole of that day and of Saturday with her, summoned by an urgent telephone message ear...

Gregory when he came in that evening thought at first, with a pang of fear, that Karen had gone out. It was time for dressing and she was not in their room. In the drawing-room...

Gregory went down to Cornwall again only nine days after he had left it. He and Karen met as if under an arch of infinite blessings. He had his cable to show her and she hers to...

Mrs. Talcott went early to Madame von Marwitz's room next morning, as soon, in fact, as she had seen her breakfast-tray carried away. She had shown Mercedes her telegrams the ev...

"Will you shut the door, Gregory?" Karen said. "I want to speak to you." The feeling with which he looked at her was that with which he had faced her sleeping, as he thought, af...

Karen's boxes arrived next day, neatly packed by Mrs. Barker. And not only her clothes were in them. She had left behind her the jewel-box with the pearl necklace that Gregory h...

"I'm afraid you think that I've made a dreadful mess of things, Gregory. I simply couldn't help myself," said Betty, half an hour later. "If only she hadn't gone on gazing at Ka...

If only, Gregory often felt, in thinking it over and over in the days of outer unity and inner estrangement that followed, she had not been able to go to sleep so placidly.

It was not until some three weeks after that Karen paid her visit to London. Tante had not written at once and Gregory had to control his discontent and impatience as best he mi...

"I'll see to Madame," said Mrs. Talcott with her air of composed and unassuming authority. It was somewhat the air of an old nurse, sure of her prerogatives in the nursery.

Some years had passed since Mrs. Talcott had been in London, and it seemed to her, coming up from her solitudes, noisier, more crowded, more oppressive than when she had seen it...

The days that passed after her arrival at the inn were to live in Madame von Marwitz's memory as a glare of intolerable anxiety, obliterating all details in its heat and urgency...

Karen, during the two or three days that followed her strange conversation with Mrs. Talcott, felt that while she pitied and cared for Mrs. Talcott as she had never yet pitied a...

Mrs. Forrester remained among her canaries and jonquils, thinking. She was seriously perturbed. She was, as she had said, fond of Gregory, but she was fonder, far, of Mercedes v...

The hush that had fallen was like the hush that falls on Alpine watchers in the moment before sunrise, and, with the great musician's slow emerging from below, it was as if the...

The telephone sounded while Gregory next morning ate his solitary breakfast, and the voice of Mrs. Forrester, disembodied of all but its gravity, asked him, if he would, to come...

The two days had told upon them both. The face of Mercedes was like a beautiful fruit, rain-sodden and gnawed at the heart by a worm. Mrs. Talcott's was more bleached, more deso...

It seemed to Karen, after hours had passed, that she had ceased to be tired and that her body, wafted by an involuntary rhythm, was as light as thistle-down on the wind.

Gregory walked at a brisk pace from Mrs. Forrester's house in Wilton Crescent to Hyde Park Corner, and from there, through St. James's Park, to Queen Anne's Mansions where he ha...

It was one day only after Miss Scrotton's return from America and she had returned alone, and it was to this fact that she alluded rather than to the more general results of Mad...

Peace had descended upon the little room where Karen lay, cold, still peace. There were no longer any tears or clamour, no appeals and agonies. Tante was often with her; but she...

"You've made a pretty spectacle of yourself, Mercedes," she remarked as Madame von Marwitz raised herself with extraordinary stateliness. "I've seen you behave like you were a d...

Mrs. Talcott, as she descended the staircase, heard in the little sitting-room a voice, the voice of Mercedes, speaking on and on, in a deep-toned, continuous roll of vehement d...

Madame Von Marwitz looked out from her fly at the ugly little wayside inn with its narrow lawn and its bands of early flowers. Trees rose round it, the moors of the forest stret...