The black Flemings

David Fleming laughed half aloud at the fancy and stepped back into the rambling country road, where wheel tracks were so quickly obliterated in the loose-drifting sand, to cont...

This was Black Roger, who had been master here at Wastewater all the days of his stormy and brilliant life. The face at which David was staring now so thoughtfully had been one...

So there was the story, thought David, rousing himself from his favourite position of leaning forward in his low chair, with his linked hands between his knees, and looking upwa...

Gabrielle was wandering along an overgrown path before breakfast the next morning when David came after her and sauntered at her side. The sun was shining brilliantly after a cl...

Three hours later she said good-bye to him composedly at Aunt Flora’s side. He carried away a pleasant recollection of her, standing there tall and smiling, with her gray eyes s...

On the day that Sylvia and her guests were coming from the north, and David probably from the south, there was no sunshine. There was a cold, unsteady, wind, and a cold, hard, l...

Flora’s little Christmas house party for her daughter was a small affair, after all, but to Gabrielle’s confused eyes there seemed to be eighteen laughing and talking persons ra...

The rest of the house party was to her a thrilling, but too rapidly flying, dream. The young people walked, rosy and whirled and beaten and shouting with laughter, in the formid...

The next morning David was surprised, and a little touched, to have his aunt come up to him in the shadowy upper hall and embrace him warmly. It was a long time since he had had...

The night that followed was one of the strange, abnormal times that seemed--David thought more than once--so peculiarly appropriate, so peculiarly in tone with the atmosphere of...

Winter sunlight was slanting into the room when she awakened, and for a while she lay still, trying to reconcile these beams from the southwest with any possible hour on a Janua...

Gabrielle, however, was more affronted than puzzled by it. It made her definitely uneasy. She suspected at once what was in his mind, and in the utter despair that engulfed her...

He plunged, the next morning, into work, going off to Keyport immediately after breakfast and returning late in the afternoon. The day was exquisite beyond words, the sea satiny...

So there was this new fact with which to deal: Tom Fleming had come home. Tom, thirty, lean, burned a leathery brown by a thousand tropic suns, had apparently determined to retu...

One afternoon, when he had been at home for several weeks, he and Gay were alone on the rocks. It was again a burning afternoon, but Tom liked heat, and Gabrielle’s dewy skin st...

The weeks that followed seemed to Gabrielle Fleming, even at the time when they were actually passing, strangely and darkly unnatural, and afterward they remained a fearful memo...

The voice was droning away close to her ear in the howling noise and blackness. Gabrielle made an effort to think and to move her head. But her senses all reeled together in a s...

The doctor returned with another doctor, in the course of the strange disorganized day, and Etta, murmuring with the other maids in the kitchen, sucked in a great sigh as she es...

She stopped. And after a long minute of silence the young persons looked at each other. Tom had been sitting throughout in a low chair with his hands locked; now he merely grinn...

It was more than a long year later that David Fleming, driving the car that Sylvia had ordered with such happy confidence before that long-awaited twenty-first birthday, left Cr...

She was tall, and wearing a dark blue suit under a belted brown coat, a loose rich sable-skin about her shoulders. A blue hat, bright with cornflowers was pressed down over her...