The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange

But when the door opened to admit the person she was awaiting, the surprise was hers. It was a woman who stood before her, a woman and an oddity. Yet, in just what her oddity la...

“She is not a good woman, but I might have been a good man if I had never known the sin which drew a line of isolation about her, and within which I, and only I, have stood with...

“I had a talk with Father this morning. He came to my room, and--and it was very near being serious. Someone had told him I was doing things on the sly which he had better look...

What was that theory; and in what way and through whose efforts had he been enabled to form one? The following notes may enlighten us. Though written in his own hand, and undoub...

He was quick to take advantage of her obvious embarrassment. “Should I have been sent to you if I had not first secured the confidence of the sender? You know the scandal attach...

“It was a task requiring no little strength and address, but he managed, after a few herculean efforts, to shift them aside and I saw with delight, my way opened to that mysteri...

Piqued by the thought, she carefully reread the manuscript, and when she had again reached its uncompromising end, she gave herself up to a few minutes of concentrated thought,...

The reporter chuckled behind the pencil-end he was chewing, but the officer maintained his solemn air, for which act of self-restraint he was undoubtedly grateful when in anothe...

Violet sighed in the midst of her triumph. Her curiosity had been satisfied, but the problem she had been set to solve looked inexplicable. But she was not one to yield easily t...

“Ah, that I have not the least means of knowing. But,” she objected, in sudden distrust, “what do you want of Leonard? If he did not follow Dr. Zabriskie to his own door, he cou...

This was an immense affair, made to accommodate itself to the shape of the room, but with a hollowed-out space on the window-side large enough to hold a chair for the sitter who...

“Behind a projecting ledge of stone from which a tattered rug still hung, I came upon two nails driven a few feet apart into a fissure of the rock. I had driven those nails myse...

If so, to what lengths a woman’s imagination can go! Or so their combined looks seemed to proclaim, when to their utter astonishment they saw the officer, who had presented a ca...

“Dr. Zabriskie,” quoth the inspector, “we have endeavoured to make this trial a perfectly fair one. You are to have a shot at a small clock which has been placed within a suitab...

When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld her once before, and to a life...

“O, Mr. Driscoll,” she began,--and then he saw that a group of anxious girls hovered in her rear--“my pendant! my beautiful pendant! It is gone! Somebody reached in from the bal...

But no such result followed. The passion of grief into which the mother was thrown by the shipwreck of all her hopes left her hard and implacable, and when, as very soon happene...

The personage knew her father--everyone did--and the wonder had always been that she dared run the risk of displeasing one so implacable. Though she was his favourite child, Pet...

Mr. Van Broecklyn, their host, had in his melancholy life but one interest which could be at all absorbing. This was for explosives. As consequence, much of the talk at the dinn...

“But now that bullet has been found. And where? In the most startling place in the world, viz.: in the larynx of the child found lying dead upon the floor beside his father, str...

“That yon silly little chit, whose father I know, whose fortune I know, who is seen everywhere, and who is called one of the season’s belles is an agent of yours; a--a--”

Roger, you must understand me now,--my desire for money and the means I have taken to obtain it. My sister had the makings of a prima-donna. Her husband, of whose ability I had...