The Fortunate Youth

THE London physician arrived, sat up with Paul most of the night, and went away the next morning saying that he was a dead man. Dr. Fuller, however, advanced the uncontrovertibl...

PAUL KEGWORTHY lived with his mother, Mrs. Button, his stepfather, Mr. Button, and six little Buttons, his half brothers and sisters. His was not an ideal home; it consisted in...

WHEN they reached London in November, after circuitous wanderings, Barney Bill said to Paul: "You've seed enough of me, matey, to know that I wish yer good and not harm. I've fe...

He had recently purchased from a pawnshop a second-hand mandoline, which he had mastered by the aid of a sixpenny handbook, and he would play on it accompaniments to sentimental...

PAUL looked from side to side at the palely lit faces of the spectators, trying to distinguish Barney Bill and Jane. But he did not see them. He was disappointed and depressed,...

PAUL leaned back in his leather writing chair, smoking a cigarette and focussing the electioneering situation. Beside a sheet of foolscap on which he had been jotting down notes...

ONE morning Paul, with a clump of papers in his hand, entered his pleasant private room at Drane's Court, stepped briskly to the long Cromwellian table placed in the window bay,...

"No--not angry--with you and Jane--certainly not. I know you acted for the best, out of love for me. But you shouldn't have deceived me. I thought it was a mere nervous breakdow...

THE next morning amazement fluttered over a million breakfast tables and throbbed in a million railway carriages. For all the fierceness of political passions, parliamentary ele...

SO the lovers were reconciled, although the question of marriage was farther off than ever, and the Princess and Miss Winwood wept on each other's shoulders after the way of goo...

A FEW days afterwards you might have seen Paul dashing through the quiet main street of Morebury in a high dog-cart, on his way to call on the Princess. A less Fortunate Youth m...

It had rained all day, and now there was sullen clearance. Paul, who had been bathing with some factory boys in the not very savoury canal a mile or so distant, had wandered mec...

HICKNEY HEATH blazed with excitement. It is not every day that a thrill runs through a dull London borough, not even every election day. For a London borough, unlike a country t...

IT was a day of dust and blaze. Dust lay thick on the ground, it filled the air, it silvered the lower branches of the wayside trees, it turned the old brown horse into a dapple...

FOR splenetic reasons which none but the Buttons of this world can appreciate, Paul was forbidden, under pain of ghastly tortures, to go near the Sunday school again, and, lest...

PAUL had been four years on the stage. Save as a memory they had as little influence on the colour of his after-life as his years at Bludston or his years in the studios. He was...

IN the tense silence of the few moments of waiting Paul passed from the boy to whom the earth had been a fairyland to the man grappling with great realities. In those few moment...

THE shooting party came, and Paul, able to leave his room and sit in the sunshine and crawl about the lawn and come down to dinner, though early retirement was prescribed, went...

BETWEEN the young man of immaculate vesture, of impeccable manners, of undeniable culture, of instinctive sympathy with the great world where great things are done, of unerring...

IT would never end. Why should it? Could a Great Wonder be merely a transient thrill? Absurd. Dawn followed night, day after day, and the wonder had not faded. It would never fa...

DAYS of strain followed: days of a thousand engagements, a thousand interviews, a thousand journeyings, a thousand speeches; days in which he was reduced to an unresisting autom...

MISS URSULA WINWOOD, hatless, but with a cotton sunshade swinging over her shoulder, and with a lean, shiny, mahogany-coloured Sussex spaniel trailing behind, walked in her calm...

"It is becoming that," said the Princess. "And we can wait a little, Paul, can't we? We are so happy like this. Ah!" she sighed. "I have never been so happy in my life."