The Crater

"Not that her heart stayed very merry: while, for the matter of that, even her beauty was a good deal altered the last time I met her and heard from her lips the story I am goin...

Telling the story a fortnight later, Norah said that this evening offered her the last peace and contentment she was to know. I fancy one must have youth as well as a good diges...

At first she can hardly have seemed credible to Archie, momentarily expecting the end. In the middle of death and destruction, suddenly this vivid beauty. And not an academic, i...

One day, towards the end of the dry season in Central Africa more than two years later, Norah was sitting on an empty packing-case under the shade of an acacia, watching the til...

She had come to breakfast with a generous act of submission, and an affectionate reconciliation prepared. The sort of thing that closes the story on the screen, but, alas! ends...

'Dans le monde de la realité,' that thinker had apparently concluded, 'comme dans le monde des fées, la femme appartient toujours à celui qui sait arriver à elle et la délivrer...

The lovers had waited on the farm for Dick's supplies to come till Norah would stay no longer. Leaving a letter for Archie, and replenishing Dick's stores from the reserves on t...

Now Norah mentioned it, the engines did sound odd. Why didn't he know more about the damn things? It was monstrous running a British boat with black officers and crew. Anything...

There was some ground for this apprehension. They had boarded the vessel, scrambling up a rope from her dinghy on to her dirty iron deck, to be welcomed by a corpulent, bowing f...

Her eyes were on Dick, white clad, tall and elegant, in the centre of a sooty group, whose rags dripped with sweat and whose hands waved in wild gesticulation. Her ears were ass...

Norah woke before it was light. She made no attempt to recapture a sleep that dreams had disturbed--dreams in which the ox was drowned again, in which a crocodile pursued her le...

"The blooms of the almond tree grow in a night and vanish in a morn: the flies _hœmerœ_ take life with the sun and die with the dew: fancy that slippeth in with a gaze goeth out...

It was midnight before I saw Ross again. Then I found him by the odour and glow of his cigar and by the glint of the masthead lamp on his bald head.

After the manner of men in love, Dick seems to have enjoyed discussing his emotions with Norah. So, building on what she told me, I can reconstruct in some degree his feelings o...

The mountains still stemmed the morning sunlight when Archie, who had dressed by the ashes of his fire, sat down to await the arrival of the guide who was to lead the way down t...

The first face he saw was Dick's. In spite of the heat through canvas, Norah had retired into the tent. Archie wondered if it was to show she had not sent for Ward. 'Damn the fe...

Two or three big drops of rain fell. Norah made her way slowly back to camp. Near the ruins she was stopped by Dick, already tired of watching the woodcutters. She noticed that...

He answered that every time he'd ever left a native to himself he'd regretted it. And this was too important. He couldn't be relied on to get a buck with every round and not a d...

When Dick had fallen, for a perceptible time his murderer stood without motion, without thought, the noise of the shot ringing in his ears. Norah, he noticed at last, was kneeli...

That afternoon when Norah had helped Archie down the hillside, where the work of transporting the logs was in process and where she had made her difficult offer of reconciliatio...

"Abercorn," said Ross, lighting his third consecutive cigar, "was laid out some quarter of a century ago by a far-sighted and optimistic official on the lines of Paris. There ar...

I had finished breakfast and with the help of my fishing fundi was putting a patch on the elder of my canoes, when I heard a voice. Even if the Sinclairs had not been on my mind...

Archie, when we reached his camp, was lying on his back with open eyes that saw nothing visible to us. The bedclothes were in a heap on the ground and he resisted Norah when she...

Archie's convalescence was rapid; within a week he was well enough to receive a visitor. During the days of his recovery I had come to know him better than ever before. The stra...