The Coast of Chance

Flora Gilsey stood on the threshold of her dining-room. She had turned her back on it. She swayed forward. Her bare arms were lifted. Her hands lightly caught the molding on eit...

She wondered, as he heaped her ermine on her shoulders, if Harry might not have more surprises for her than she had supposed. Perhaps she had taken him too much for granted. Aft...

Ella Buller, in the van of her procession, was already descending upon them. Her approach dissipated the last remnant of their personal moment. Her presence always insisted that...

But Harry's nervousness had left him, now that Purdie was within his reach. He returned the glance indifferently. He stood close to the major--his hand on his shoulder. The majo...

"Harry, how horrid of you!" She was on the point of declaring that she knew Kerr very well indeed; but she remembered this might not be the thing to say to Harry.

She turned, and there they were yet. They had not moved. The shadow of the gesticulating little Chinaman danced like a bird on the wall, and before him Harry glowed, immovable,...

"I'm sorry." Her tone was sweetly vague. What could be the matter with him? Then, half timidly, she rallied him. "If you go on like this, I shall have to show you my talisman."

She broke off that thought, and looked long at the little flame of the lamp. It was strange, but there was no doubt in her mind but that he wanted it. That had been the stronges...

She stood on the threshold, pale, and brilliant still in her blaze of anger, equal, at last, to anything. Kerr, as he signaled to her with every lineament of his enlivened face,...

Flora went red. She walked down the room from him to give her suddenly tumultuous heart time. However little he might guess the real trend of her interview with Kerr, she couldn...

Then what was Harry? The bland implacable pronouncement of Shima had summoned him up to stand beside Kerr more clearly than her own eyes could have shown him. Surely she was giv...

There was a sudden cessation of talk; a movement of forms dimly seen in the thick blue element; and then through wreaths of smoke, the judge's face dawned upon her like a sun th...

"I mean it, I mean it," he assured her. "This doesn't make it any less real, my getting at you through a garden. Better," he added, "and sweet of you to make the duller way impo...

She pulled herself free. Without his arms around her for the first moment she could hardly stand. She took an uncertain step forward; then with a rush she reached the white curt...

For the first time since the thing began Clara was left out completely. Flora knew she was even left out of a possibility of listening at the keyhole. For the bright, tight, lit...

"Are you sure, or has he only let you think so? We have all at some time longed, or even thought it was our duty, to adjust something when it would have been safer to have kept...

Flora watched them meeting each other so gallantly with a trembling compunction. Mrs. Herrick, who trusted her, was giving her hand in sublime ignorance. It was vain that Flora...

"I shall tell the truth, whatever comes," she exulted. To tell the truth and keep on telling it--that, in her passion of relief at speaking out at last, was all she wanted! But...

The tallest eucalyptus top was all of the garden that was touched with sun when Flora came out of the house in the morning. She stood a space looking at that little cone of brig...

"What separates it from most books of its class is its distinction of manner, its unusual grace of diction, its delicacy of touch, and the fervent charm of its love passages. It...