The Fighting Chance

The days of the house-party at Shotover were numbered. A fresh relay of guests was to replace them on Monday, and so they were making the most of the waning week on lawn and mar...

Siward, at his desk, over which the May sunshine streamed, his crutches laid against his chair, sat poring over the piles of papers left there by Beverly Plank some days before...

In a city in transition, where yesterday is as dead as a dead century, where those who prepare the old year for burial are already taking the ante-mortem statement of the new, t...

Ferrall, reasonable in most things, detested customs exotic, and usually had an Englishman or two about the house to tell them so, being unable to jeer in any language except hi...

The week passed swiftly, day after day echoing with the steady fusillade from marsh to covert, from valley to ridge. Guns flashed at dawn and dusk along the flat tidal reaches h...

By January the complex social mechanism of the metropolis was whirling smoothly again; the last ultra-fashionable December lingerer had returned from the country; those of the s...

The heat, which had been severe in June, driving the last fashionable loiterer into the country, continued fiercely throughout July. August was stifling; the chestnut leaves in...

There was a scent of sap and new buds in the February haze, a glimmer of green on southern slopes, a distant bird note, tentative, then confident, rippling from the gray tangle...

About four o'clock on the following afternoon Mrs. Mortimer's maid, who had almost finished drying and dressing her mistress' hair, was called to the door by a persistent knocki...

If a man's grief does not awaken his dignity, then he has none. In that event, grief is not even respectable. And so it was with Leroy Mortimer when Lydia at last turned on him....

The first person he encountered in the gun-room was Quarrier, who favoured him with an expressionless stare, then with a bow, quite perfunctory and non-committal. It was plain e...

After the first few days of his arrival at Shotover time had threatened to hang heavily on Mortimer's mottled hands. After the second day afield he recognised that his shooting...

A house of native stone built into and among weather-scarred rocks, one massive wing butting seaward, others nosing north and south among cedars and outcropping ledges--the whol...

The speed of the train slackened; a broad tidal river flashed into sight below the trestle, spreading away on either hand through yellowing level meadows. And now, above the roa...

In September, her marriage to Siward excitingly imminent, Sylvia had been seized with a passion for wholesale renunciation and rigid self-chastisement. All that had been so mate...