The Duchess of Wrexe, Her Decline and Death; A Romantic Commentary

Felix Brun, perched like a little bird, on the steps of the Rede Art Gallery, gazed up and down Bond Street, with his sharp eyes for someone to whom he might show Yale Ross's po...

No. 104 Portland Place was the house where the Duchess of Wrexe had lived now for sixty years. On the left as you go towards the park it had an air that no other house in the Pl...

Lady Adela had returned from that visit to her mother's portrait with a confused mind. She was not used to confused minds and resented them; whenever so great an infliction came...

It was about a quarter-past six, and the May evening was sending through the windows its pale glow suggesting soft blue skies and fading lights. Miss Rand's room told you at onc...

Downstairs the dinner-party was at its height. Mrs. Newton, the housekeeper, went softly down the passages to give one last glimpse at the ballroom. There it lay, like a great g...

It was a superb May afternoon; white clouds, bolster-shaped, were piled in the heavens and made, so rounded were they, the blue sky seem an infinite distance away. It was a day...

"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist, demirep, That loves and saves her soul in new French books-- We...

Christopher had accepted this invitation, and now on a sultry afternoon in June found himself sitting in Brun's rooms. Brun's sitting-room had a glazed and mathematical appearan...

Those weeks were, to Rachel, a golden time. She did not pretend to deny or examine their golden quality--they were far, far better than she had imagined anything could ever be,...

"What of Adam cast out of Eden? (And O the Bower and the hour!) Lo! with care like a shadow shaken He kills the hard earth whence he was taken."

The Duchess had suffered, during the last five or six years, from sleeplessness, and throughout these hot days and nights of June and July sleep almost deserted her. Grimly she...

Rachel sat in the train with Aunt Adela and Uncle John: they were on their way to Trunton St. Perth, Lord Massiter's country house. It was a July day softened with cool airs and...

The footman who was valeting him had pulled up the blind and drawn aside the curtains, and the garden came to him, not as on last evening, weighed with its canopy of stars, but...

"For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow. And trains of sombre men, past tale of number, Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go: But even for them awhil...

"Each in the crypt would cry, 'But one freezes here! and why? 'When a heart, as chill, 'At my own would thrill Back to life, and its fires out-fly? 'Heart, shall we live or die?...

It was good of you to write to me and I must apologize for allowing your letter to remain so long unanswered, but, on my return from abroad, there were naturally a great many th...

She had dreaded with an almost fantastic alarm this meeting. No other human being knew her so honestly and accurately as did Christopher, and the change in her that he would at...

"So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgment making; Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter In sleep a king; but waking no such matter."

"Of everything," returned Mrs. Chick. "Of course we must. It's a world of change. Anyone would surprise me very much, Lucretia, and would greatly alter my opinion of their under...

"We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little farther: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, Across that angry or that glimmering sea. ... but s...

"I judge more than I used to--but it seems to me that I have earned the right. One can't judge till one is forty; before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addit...

During that terrible December week in 1899, England suffered more defeats to her arms than during any other week of the century. Magersfontein, Stormberg, Colenso, their names l...

The world, during all these months, had seemed to Lizzie Rand a very silent place. Before that July night it had been loud with incident, coloured with possibilities, strange an...

Introspection had been always to Roddy a thing unknown. He had never regarded himself as in any way different from the other men whom he met, and he would have been greatly dist...

"Exile of immortality, strongly wise, Strain through the dark with undesirous eyes, To what may be beyond it. Sets your star, O heart, for ever? Yet behind the night, Waits for...

Francis Breton had known, during the weeks that preceded his letter to Rachel, torture that became to him at last so personal that he felt deliberate malignant agency behind its...

Trouble invaded the strongholds of 104 Portland Place that winter: The Duchess was not so well ... no evasions, whether above or below stairs, could conceal the harsh truth. The...

"... But the Red Dwarf, although as malevolent as possible, found that his ill-temper had no effect against true love, which always won in the end, even with quite stupid people."

"If I'd had the power not to be born, I would certainly not have accepted existence upon conditions that are such a mockery. But I still have the power to die, though the days I...

"When God smote His hands together, and struck out the soul at a spark, Into the organized glory of things, from drops of the dark,-- Say, didst thou shine, didst thou burn, did...

That afternoon had been a difficult one for Roddy. He felt, lying so eternally on his back, the vagaries of the English weather. There were days when the wind was in the park, w...

The storm savagely retreating left blue skies, spring, and the greenest grass the parks had ever displayed, behind it. Roddy, lying before his window, watched the pond, gleaming...

She was, it seemed, unconscious of them all, fixing her eyes upon a large black-leather arm-chair, settling slowly down into it, dismissing Peters and the footman with "Thank yo...

His only desire now was that there should be peaceful silence. His hatred for scenes had always been with him an instinct, natural, alert, untiring, so that he would undertake m...

"So she put the handkerchief, and the pin, and the lock of hair back into the box, turned the key, and went resolutely about her everyday duties again."--Mrs. Ewing.

"Not without fortitude I wait ... ... I, in this house so rifted, marr'd, So ill to live in, hard to leave; I, so star-weary, over-warr'd, That have no joy in this your day."

The Duchess of Wrexe died on the morning of May 2nd at a quarter-past three o'clock. The evening papers of that day and the morning papers of the next had long columns concernin...

Late on the evening of May 17th Christopher heard of the relief of Mafeking. It was too advanced an hour, he understood, for the town to display its triumph that evening. Let Ch...