The Fourth Generation

Leonard met Constance a few days later at the club, and they dined at the same table. As for the decision and the rejection, they were ignored by tacit consent. The situation re...

Leonard turned up his light in the study. His eye fell upon the Book of Extracts. He looked at his watch. Nearly twelve. He took up the book resolutely. Another wave of loathing...

In the lightest and sunniest rooms of an unpretending flat forming part of the Bendor Mansions, Westminster, sat a young man of six-and-twenty. You have already seen him when he...

It was a morning of early March, when a northeast wind ground together the dry branches on which as yet there were no signs of coming spring; the sky was covered by a grey cloud...

Leonard shut the book and threw it aside. He sat thinking over it for a little. Then he thought it was time to go to bed. There was not much of the night left; in fact, it was a...

“Good heavens!” cried Leonard, “what is the matter with this man?” For his uncle dropped speechless, limp, broken up, into a chair, and there lay, his hands dangling, his face f...

“I knew it was a message, because I saw it with my mind’s eye written clear and bright, and because I heard it plain and unmistakable. It came to me in the night. I thought it w...

“The Hermit, or the Recluse, has long disappeared from the roadside, from the bridge-end, from the river bank. His Hermitage sometimes remains, as at Warkworth, but the ancient...

It was Sunday morning. Leonard sat before the fire doing nothing. He had done nothing for three weeks. He had no desire to do anything: his work lay neglected on the table, book...

Leonard was left alone. He threw himself into a chair and tried to think. He could not. The power of concentration had left him. The tension of the last three weeks, followed by...

The rôle of coincidence in the history of the Individual is much more important than any writer of fiction has ever dared to represent. Not the coincidence which is dear to the...

On a cold day, with a grey sky and an east wind, Leonard for the first time walked down the Commercial Road to call upon the newly-found cousins. It is a broad thoroughfare, but...

It was eleven o’clock that same evening. Leonard sat before his fire thinking over the day’s work. It was not a day on which he could congratulate himself. He had been refused:...

In one of the streets lying east of Chancery Lane is a block of buildings, comparatively new, let out as offices. They generally consist of three rooms, but sometimes there are...

When he was gone Leonard threw himself into the nearest chair, and looked around him. He gazed with bewildered face, not upon the study full of books, the papers which showed th...

It was the Sunday afternoon after these visits to the ancestor and to the group in the Commercial Road. Leonard was slowly returning home after a solitary lunch. He walked with...

Mrs. Christopher Campaigne was at home. The rooms were filled with people--chiefly young people, friends of her son and daughter. Most of them were endowed with those literary a...

“The theory of consequence”--Leonard was arranging his thoughts on paper for better clearness--“while it answers most of the difficulties connected with hereditary trouble, brea...

Leonard stood looking straight before him when the girl had gone. Well, the omissions so much regretted by Constance seemed to be fully supplied. He was now exactly like other p...

If you have the rare power of being able to work at any time, and after any event to concentrate your thoughts on work, this is certainly a good way of receiving disappointments...

“Come to get another speech, Fred?” Christopher looked up cheerily from the work before him. The sweet spring season, when the big dinners are going on, is his time of harvest,...