The Crime and the Criminal

Six or seven of us were in the street outside the club when the meeting was over. Where the rest had vanished to I do not know. There was not a cab to be seen. I doubt if a cab...

He had the crimson-covered book open in front of him. He read aloud the oath by which we all had bound ourselves. As he did so, men sobered down a little. The oath which he had...

Yes, unannounced. I am sure that if I had had the least suspicion of his approaching presence I should have kept him out by the simple expedient of turning the key in the door....

As Burton said, it was a shooting day. When I had dressed I went straight down on to the terrace. There was a slight nip in the air, and the faintest whisper of a breeze. It was...

But he went with me to Cockington. More, he picked up the cheque, and cashed it, and let Pendarvon have his money before he went. He struck me as not being very far from drunk w...

That Thursday was wet. It drizzled all day long. I was not feeling well. I had had trouble with one of my maids--caught her tampering with a lock, and sent her packing on the sp...

The man twiddled his hat round and round between his hands, as if he sought inspiration from its brim. I sat and watched him. He was a poor kind of scamp. He was so easily nonpl...

Jack Haines and Daniel J. Carruth had been partners. I might have married either of them, for the matter of that. I might have married any one in Strikehigh City. Of two evils I...

I have not lived in the world so long as I have done, and seen so much of it, without realising how small a world, after all, it really is, and how full it is of coincidence; bu...

I had not a notion that it would be Louise, that evening at the club--not the very faintest! How could I have? I did not know that the lot would fall to me. I was the first to d...

Again I was struck by the man's resemblance to Mr. Townsend. It was obvious even in the way in which he advanced towards me across the room. It was almost as if Townsend had sli...

Beaupré is the third son of the Duke of Glenlivet--one of the duke's famed thirteen. Not a bad sort--stone broke, like all the rest of us. Archie was born in two different secti...

I wondered if he had an inkling of what it was that I might have to say to him. He showed no signs of it. But one could not tell. I felt, instinctively, that his intuition was e...

I went down to Brighton to spend the Sunday with Lettice Enderby--she was acting at the theatre there. I found her not feeling very well. We spent the day alone together. After...

It was plain that Mrs. Carruth was impatient. Nor was the thing made less evident by her attempts to conceal it from herself. She lounged on a couch. A pile of books and magazin...

I was quite conscious, as I drove home the rest of the way alone, that I had made of myself, doubly and trebly, a fool. But, if possible, still worse remained behind.

The voice seemed to come to me out of the land of dreams. I seemed to be in a dream myself. What I saw, I seemed to see in a dream. It was some moments before I realised that th...

It was a handsome room, that in which Mr. Townsend, when at home, passed the larger portion of his waking hours--large, lofty, well-proportioned. The walls were wainscoted. Here...

Sir Haselton Jardine was a man whom I had rather been in the habit of holding in awe. One never could be certain how much he knew. A man could scarcely rise to the forensic heig...

I am not able to describe all that took place. To begin with, everything that happened seemed to me for some time to be happening in a dream. When, afterwards, I read the accoun...

The Club was to hold a session. The gentleman who, if he was not the actual source of inspiration, was, at any rate, the founder, the promoter, the organiser, the backbone of th...

At the inn or hotel, or whatever they called it, at which I was stopping, every one was talking of the trial. The chambermaid, who waited on me at dinner, could talk of nothing...

Mr Tennant looked at the warder who spoke. With the assistance of his colleague the man was hurrying him along in a fashion which, even at that moment of amazement and of horror...

As he murmured the iteration, seating himself in an armchair, he selected an open letter from among a heap of others which lay on a little table at his side. The letter he had s...

The next morning, when I woke from dreams of poker, this was the first letter which I opened. It was nicely written, in a small, round hand, as clear as copperplate--somehow it...

The members, for the most part, stared at the Colonel. Then they stared at one another. They did not seem to understand. Mr. Townsend looked at the Colonel, then at Mr. Pendarvo...

Now that I had reached Victoria I did not know what to do. I continued to sit in a sort of bewilderment, wondering. Should I speak to the guard, or should I not? Should I walk o...

"Yes, dinner. It's easy enough for you to sneer, but if you'd been living on toast and water, which, to some extent, during the last four days, I practically have been doing, th...

"I beg your pardon. It was an accident." Then he raved at Mr. Holman. "You--you devil! You've been having me, tricking me, doing me. You cursed slippery British hound, I feel li...

I travelled in the same train with the judge. At Victoria, as I was standing at the carriage door, a little old gentleman, of the beer-barrel type of architecture, went toddling...

Sir Haselton Jardine's was as deadly as it very well could have been. He was not a bit of an orator. He reminded one of an automatic figure as much as anything, as if he had bee...

The club held its meetings in Horseferry Road. I had never been there in the daytime, but by night the approaches, the surroundings, the place itself did not strike one as being...

Mr. Holman's home was in a street off Leicester Square. His family consisted of his wife. Of her he was wont to make a confidant, as he did on the present occasion.

Instead there was an interval for refreshment. A buzz of talking rose in the court. With one hand the judge pressed his spectacles more firmly in their place. He took a bird's-e...

Mr. Townsend's rooms were at Albert Gate. Miss Jardine's home was in Sloane Gardens. From Albert Gate to Sloane Gardens is not very far. It was a clear, brisk morning. Mr. Towns...

To take two or three things to begin with. The muddle they have made about what happened at Three Bridges is, really, in its way, quite marvellous. And it all pans out so clean-...

There were several letters by the morning's post. One's creditors, at any rate, seemed to be in town. Do those sort of people ever go away? Lily Langdale wanted me to look her u...

These might be a silver lining to the cloud. If there was, I should have liked to have had a peep at it. Just then it would have done me good. I could not see much promise of ha...

I ran down to Brighton for the Sunday. My wife's cousin, George Baxendale, was stopping there, with the Coopers. The wife and I were both to have gone. But our little Minna was...

I did not go home even when he had left me, though shortly afterwards I started to. As I was going along Throgmorton Street I met MacCulloch. He was jubilant. He had pulled off...

The newspapers on the Wednesday and Thursday were beyond my understanding. I had never before so clearly realised how great a stir a little thing might make. The little incident...

She had resolved to go alone. She had battled out the question with herself, upon her knees, in prayer, and it seemed to her that, of many alternatives, she had not chosen the w...