The Dragon in Shallow Waters

An immense gallery, five hundred feet long, occupied the upper floor of the main factory-building. Looking down the gallery, a perspective of iron girders spanned the roof, gaun...

“Look here,” Silas cried, “the Lord’ll hear your prayers just as well if they’re put up from your parsonage. This is my cottage, and my affairs are my affairs; what I do, or wha...

His audience was amazed at the scorn he contrived to infuse into what was, to them, nothing but a trumped-up thesis. They could not admit that this unexpected, unnecessary, far-...

Calthorpe had already noticed that she never lost an opportunity of praising her husband and advertising her own contentment. She was more reticent about her brother-in-law, and...

She delighted in him. He was perfectly grave, and affected a Lincolnshire accent, which he certainly had not possessed when he first came into the room; a subtle insolence, but...

The train discharging him at Spalding, he fought his way against wind and rain, along the lonely road on the top of the dyke. He trudged with his hands in his pockets and a bund...

Yet they were so like prisoners, Silas in his darkness, Gregory in his silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles. When they stirred, it should have...

“Yes, this afternoon.” Although she was guiltless she had all the quick panic of guilt,—what should she say? what must she not say? hold concealed?—and she felt that Silas held...

Silas became unwontedly withdrawn into himself, neither Nan nor Morgan knew what to make of him. At times he avoided them, at other times silently sought their company. Gregory,...

This wound, this gash, to be exposed to the village! How greedily they would lick up his blood! they would set upon him with claw and fang as upon a lion brought low. No delight...

Regarding Nan as his chattel, he never wondered whether he was or was not agreeable to her, and in his egoism never noticed her sensitive wilting under his caresses. His pride a...

He was ready, but for his coat. He stood in his shirt sleeves looking at Nan and wondering whether he should wake her or slip away to the station with no farewell. Then he bent...

“It’s awful, your revengefulness.... But I tried to make it _less_ black, Silas, so did Linnet; look, I don’t ask you now to help me, or to tell me anything, but only to let me...

Nan was crying; she was frightened by the monstrous, fantastic extravagance of the scene. Silas must have decoyed her to the heart of some distorted maze, where death was not so...