The Following of the Star: A Romance

Luncheon would have been an awkward affair, owing to David's nervous awe of Mrs. Marmaduke Vane and his extreme trepidation in her presence, had it not been for Diana's tact and...

On the afternoon of Christmas-eve, Diana sat in the library writing to David. She had drawn up a small table close to the fire. The room was cosy, and perfectly quiet, excepting...

The black marble clock on the mantel-piece had struck midnight, more slowly and sonorously than it ever sounded the hour by day. Each stroke had seemed a knell--a requiem to bri...

David Rivers closed his Bible suddenly, slipped it into the inner pocket of his coat, and, leaning back in his armchair, relaxed the tension at which he had been sitting while h...

"Well, my dear David, all our festivities are over, and, having piloted our party safely into the calm waters of Boxing-day afternoon, I am free to retire to the library, and re...

As David tramped to church the moon was rising. The fir trees stood, dark and stately, beneath their nodding plumes of feathery snow. The little village church, with its white r...

"Why not?" he said. "Why not! Why because, even if I wished--I mean, even if you wished--even if we both wished for each other--in that way--Central Africa is no place for a wom...

When at last her car came speeding through the trees, it seemed to her a swiftly approaching Nemesis, a relentless hurrying Fate, which she could neither delay nor avoid. It ran...

As the gilt clock on the mantel-piece hurriedly struck six, corroborated in the distance by the slow booming of Big Ben, a page boy knocked at Diana's sitting-room door, announc...

To Diana it seemed that their positions were suddenly and unaccountably reversed. David led, and she followed. David set the tone of the conversation; and, as he chose that it s...

Diana's mind was so absorbed by her love for David, that she scarcely realised how completely she kept it out of her letters; or that his reticence might merely have been a refl...

The door into the great hall opened as David stepped out of the motor. A footman took his overcoat, and he found himself following an elderly butler across the spacious hall tow...

Once again it was Christmas-eve; but, in the midst of the strenuous life of a busy London hospital, Diana scarcely had leisure to realise the season, or to allow herself the pri...

The collection, for Church Expenses, was the largest ever taken in Brambledene Church, within the memory of man. In one of the plates, there was gold. David knew quite well who...

The offertory, on these occasions, is always devoted to the work of the Church of the Holy Star, in Ugonduma. The offertory is always the largest in the whole year; but that may...

David thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his short coat, well cut, but inclined to be somewhat threadbare. He crossed his knees, and lay back comfortably in the Rector's...

"I want to tell you of it, David, because it is one of those utterly unexpected, beautiful happenings, which, on the rare occasions when they do occur, make one feel that, after...

"Rubbish, my dear Chappie!" had said Diana. "You are just the sort of person who would marry the clothes, without giving much thought to the man inside them. _I_ don't propose t...

"I am morally certain 'Chappie' is a poodle," thought David to himself, at breakfast. "It would be just like her to have a large black poodle, abnormally clever, perfectly clipp...

Diana dined alone at the little round table in the big dining-room. She wore the white satin gown she had worn on the evening of Christmas-day, when David dined with her. The ta...

"You old flirt!" laughed Diana. "How many more hearts of men do you contemplate capturing, before you shuffle off this mortal coil? Chappie, you are a hardened old sinner! Howev...

He had said: "I have told your husband, Mrs. Rivers." This was unlike Sir Deryck's usual tact. It seemed so impossible that that dream-like service had transformed her from _Mis...

When the unexpected, beyond all imagining, suddenly takes place in a life, its every-day setting loses reality; its commonplace surroundings become intangible and vague. There s...

She felt very much as she had felt on her return to Riverscourt after Uncle Falcon's funeral. It had been such a relief then to be returning to a perfectly normal house, where e...

"Does that tempt you?" asked Diana. "Yes; I might have known you were full of music. Your sufferings, over the performances of the Brambledene choir, were more patent than you r...

A cheerful fire blazed in the grate. Every electric light in the room--and there were many--was turned on. Even the little portable lamp on the writing-table, beneath its soft s...

He had mentioned in one of his letters, that among a package of illustrated papers which had reached his station, he had found one in which was an excellent photograph of Diana,...

Christmas-eve had come round again. The successive changes of each season had passed over Riverscourt;--the awakening of early spring, when earth threw off her pall of snow, and...

Diana followed David up the gangway of the big liner, and looked around with intense interest at the floating hotel he was to inhabit during so many days; the vessel which was t...

A year ago she would have flung herself upon her knees, sobbing: "David, David!" But the time for weeping and calling him had long gone by. These deeper depths of anguish neithe...

"It is impossible," wrote David, "to give an opinion as to which was the greater or lesser wrong, when your friend had already advanced so far down a crooked way. Undoubtedly it...

Diana had waited a minute or two in the motor, in order to allow time for the entrance and seating of Mrs. Vane; also, Mr. Inglestry was to give the signal to the musician at th...

When Diana had finished reading David's letter, she folded it, replaced it in the envelope; rose, laid aside her uniform, slipping on a grey cashmere wrapper, with soft white si...

It had not taken long to see over the liner. Diana had flown about, from dining-saloon to hurricane-deck, in feverish haste to be back in number 74, in order to have a few quiet...

Diana sighed. "That will most likely mean another bad operation to-night," she remarked to Sir Deryck. "These fogs work pitiless havoc among poor fellows on the line. We had a d...

"MY DEAR WIFE--" wrote David, "I hope you will try to understand what I am about to write and not think, for a moment, that I under-value the pleasure and help I have received f...

He had always held that every immortal soul was of equal value in the sight of God; and that the bringing into the kingdom of an untutored African savage, was of as much importa...

His letters became less regular. Sometimes they were written in pencil, with more or less incoherent apologies for not using ink. The writing was larger than David's usual neat...

"Alive? Why, yes," he said; "and better than merely alive. He has fallen into a natural sleep. His pulse is steadying and strengthening every moment. If he can but sleep on like...