The girl he loved

“Oh, nothing! Just putting away something. There is nothing like a hole in the ground. What on earth are you doing in the scullery?” eying the unwonted smartness of as much of M...

Behind a rock, not two yards from Captain Gordon’s flat young back, something stirred--stirring so faintly that even a thrush in its nest in the hawthorn bush did not hear it. P...

“Oh!” said Ravenel Annesley to the empty schoolroom, the ill-spread breakfast-table. She stared at the small envelope that lay on her plate with a breathless, helpless joy. Sinc...

He hated garden-parties, and he had patiently endured the Duchess of Avonmore’s country omnium-gatherum from four o’clock until six. He could not go home, because he was staying...

Ravenel Annesley looked at herself in the glass curiously as at another person. She had on a clean white duck dress--having looked with a shudder at yesterday’s unlucky silk and...

Lord Levallion and the Duchess of Avonmore sat at breakfast in the duchess’ own sitting-room. It was one of her habits seldom to breakfast with her guests, but to have one chose...

About her was spread her whole wardrobe, which she had been looking over with the eye of a born milliner, quite certain that Levallion’s hints about London had meant he would gi...

She had carried her point and walked off Tom Annesley’s children to her big town house in Park Lane. She had given Ravenel such dresses as her own nieces would have sold their s...

The big house was a fairy-land of flowers and lights, the staircase was impassable. Ravenel, standing by her hostess in a white satin gown with a string of the Avonmore pearls r...

A week after every fashionable newspaper had a flaring announcement of the approaching marriage of Miss Ravenel Annesley and the Earl of Levallion, which was to take place at on...

“Talk of monkeys,” Levallion said to himself on the morning after their return, “they’re not a quarter as imitative as women!” and he looked at his wife across the table with a...

Ravenel Levallion, who had once been Ravenel Annesley, got up with weak and shaky legs and stared at the brown shadow of a man who stood between her and the sun. For man it was,...

She stood on the grass and watched them carry Adrian into her house, making not the slightest attempt to follow. The sun dropped below the ledge of the rose-garden, and as its r...

But if he had any idea of finding out from Adrian, the morning effectually banished it. The splinters of bone in his arm had put him in agony, and he lay as he would lie for day...

It was a wet day. A cold, steady autumn rain that made Levallion Castle chilly and shivery, and so lonely that its mistress had no desire to look at the dark corners of the room...

All dressed for dinner, she stood looking at herself in the glass as being a ladylike and thoughtful occupation to be discovered in by Tommy or Levallion; and the silver-strewn...

“She was not my wife,” Gordon said at last, for there was no reason he should not clear himself, if he dared not answer her plain question. “I never had a wife and never will ha...

The big hall of Levallion Castle was lit by two fires and a sufficiency--no more--of shaded lamps. There were plenty of cozy corners and secluded chairs behind the great square...

And yet it was not such a phantom after all! Inside were women in satin gowns, sitting at their ease among lights and flowers and frivolous talk. Outside in the damp chill of th...

“I heard you breathing,” Levallion said composedly. “No, don’t you struggle; I’ll let you go! Only be kind enough to tell me what earthly pleasure it gives you to look in my win...

Alone, in the night and the rain, he had fought down that dreadful passion, that loathing that had made him forget everything but the desire to be rid of a venomous thing. He fo...

There was no smoke coming from her chimneys, and, as he was about to dismount and knock her up, an untidy female emerged from the back premises and announced that their late ten...

“Adrian’s gone,” said Lady Levallion to herself as she woke the next morning. She knew she ought to be glad of it, thankful that he was no longer in Levallion’s house; for which...

It was many a day before any one in that room forgot the sound of Lady Levallion’s voice. She crouched on the floor, holding Levallion as she had never done, and his face was gh...

For he and his assistant had but now finished a hateful task, to Levallion’s friend, and if there was doubt about who had killed Levallion, there was none about the poison that...

Doctor Houghton looked at the country neighbors whom the very irony of fate had assuredly brought together as jurors at the inquest on the death of Lord Levallion. He had system...

Lady Gwendolen Brook, darkly handsome, exquisitely ready, even to her hat, to leave Levallion Castle the first possible instant, took the oath with a fastidious wonder as to whe...

“I saw her the next night. I followed her from the garden into the park. She was sitting on a rock in the moonlight, drinking champagne with a man. I couldn’t see her face, nor...

Sickened, helpless, Adrian Gordon had stood, indeed, for the last five minutes, as a man who comes on some awful bit of cruelty he cannot stop. Ravenel’s hunted face, her desper...

“Who’s to tell her?” Sir Thomas Annesley, Mr. Jacobs at his heels, came flying into Levallion’s own den, where something told him Houghton would be. But there was another man be...

Two days afterward the great gates of Levallion Castle were opened wide to let out the funeral of the man who had been poisoned in his own house. Behind the hearse, before the l...

In the county jail at Valehampton she must stay alone, comfortless--a girl of nineteen; must be a month away from liberty and free air before her trial. Of after that Houghton d...

Moving slowly away in the rain and darkness from that worse than useless visit to Hester Murray--which, now that his blood was cool, he saw had only served to warn her of his th...

Mrs. Murray and her story were a thunderbolt in society. It chanced that the only person who did not hear of it was Lady Annesley, whom fate had afflicted with a sharp attack of...

“You!” she cried, and if for an instant her face was transfigured, the next she put out her trembling hands as if to warn him to stay where he was. “How did you get in?”

“Well,” said Allington grimly, “you ruined a fine theory for me last night with your wire. I thought for a solid hour that I could put my fingers on the man who killed Levallion.”

For her case had been taken up by the cleverest barrister in London, and, as he showed it to her, faultlessly dovetailed together, there was not a flaw in it. Maurice Davidge, e...

For after a comfortable dinner in Monsieur Carrousel’s best manner he had strolled out, ostensibly to take a walk, really to go as hard as he could to the station and catch the...

A sound of running feet, a shrill whistle, was what Sir Thomas Annesley dreamed of where he lay on the greasy cobblestones after his somersault; and then a strong hand on his co...

Lady Levallion had reason to look like a dead woman as she stood in court, and looked once--but once--round the sea of hostile and curious faces. Not till her own lawyers had be...

Lady Annesley, having worked much evil, had wiped it out. Yet her stepdaughter never saw her after that day in court. A few lies, a scrap of india-rubber, had cost two men’s liv...