The Grey Lady

The sea seemed to rise up and fall on the disabled ship with a wild fury. There was a strange suggestion of passion in every wave as it crashed over the bulwarks. In the roar of...

"It is better so, my son"--the padre took a pinch of snuff--"because--he was not of my Church. You will stay here, you and your friend. She, the Senorita Eve, cannot be left alo...

Life is, after all, a matter of habit. In those families where rapid consumption is hereditary, the succeeding generations seem to get into the habit of dying early. They take i...

The cathedral bells were calling good Papists to their morning devotion as the Croonah moved into Valetta harbour. No sooner did her black prow appear between the pier heads tha...

The atmosphere of Mrs. Harrington's drawing-room seemed to absorb the new-found manhood of the two boys, for they came forward shyly, overawed by the consciousness of their own...

"MY DEAR MISS CHALLONER,--I learn that you are in Barcelona, and at the same time I find with some indignation that my lawyer in Mallorca, with a deplorable excess of zeal, has...

Mrs. Harrington was sitting in the great drawing-room in Grosvenor Gardens, alone. The butler was fuming and cleaning plate in his pantry. The maid was weeping in the workroom....

Luke stared straight in front of him with set lips. He looked a dangerous man to trifle with, and what woman can keep her hands out of such danger as this?

One of these boys remembers the moment to this day. A journey accomplished with Care for a travelling companion usually adheres to the wheels of memory until those wheels are st...

A howling gale of wind from the south-east, and driving snow and darkness. The light of Cap Grisnez struggling out over the blackness of the Channel, and the two Foreland lights...

The pine forests on the mountain-tops were beginning to gather the darkness as the Count de Lloseta rode up the last slope to the Casa d'Erraha. The sun had just set behind the...

Miss Ingham-Baker had, only four years earlier, left a fashionable South Coast boarding-school fully educated for the battle of life. There seem to be two classes of young ladie...

There is a valley far up in the mountains behind the ancient city of Palma--the Val d'Erraha. Some thousand years ago the Arabs found this place. After toils and labours, and ma...

As she walked back to Grosvenor Gardens, Eve reflected with some satisfaction that the Ingham-Bakers had left Mrs. Harrington's hospitable roof. From this shelter they had gone...

For a few moments they forgot such things as life and death. They did more, they defied death; for surely such love as this is stronger than the mere end of life. Again it was t...

The small town of Somarsh, in Suffolk, consists of one street running up from the so-called harbour. At one end is the railway-station; at the other the harbour and the sea, and...

The tendency of the age is to peep behind the scenes. The world is growing old, and human nature is nearly worn through; we are beginning to see the bare bones of it. But a stra...

Fortune fixed her wayward fancy on the first sketch that Eve contributed to the Commentator. Wayward, indeed, for Eve herself knew that it was not good, and in the lettered quie...

The Count's club was a small and a very select one. It was a club with a literary tendency. The porter who took charge of their coats had the air of a person who read the heavie...

The local house-agent anticipated no difficulty in letting Malabar Cottage, furnished, at a good weekly rental; and in due course a dreamy clergyman, with a wife who was anythin...

Three years later Eve was sitting on the terrace of the Casa d'Erraha. It was late autumn, and we who live in Northern latitudes do not quite realise what the autumn of Southern...

A wise man had said of Cipriani de Lloseta that had he not been a Count he would have been a great musician. He had that singular facility with any instrument which is sometimes...

The glass door of the dining-room of the Hotel of the Four Nations at Barcelona was opened softly, almost nervously, by a shock-headed little man, who peered into the room.

Agatha was singularly uncertain of herself. If it had not been for her education--at the Brighton school they had taught her that tears are not only idle, but also harmful to th...

Mrs. Ingham-Baker had been to Malta and back, but the wonders of the deep had failed to make a wiser woman of her. If one wishes to gain anything by seeing the world, it is best...

Eve looked up from the book she was reading, and Mrs. Harrington tempered her curt manner of expressing her wishes with a rare smile. She often did this for Eve's benefit, almos...

Time: Five o'clock in the afternoon. Five o'clock, that is to say, by the railway time. There is another time in Barcelona--the town time, to wit--which differs from the hour of...

"I would not do it with a teaspoon," De Lloseta had answered, and then he sat down to correct the proof of Eve's fourth article on "Spain and Spanish Life."

The Croonah ran round Europa Point into fine weather, and the wise old captain--who felt the pulse of the saloon with unerring touch--deemed it expedient to pin upon the board t...

At times Mrs. Harrington gave way to a momentary panic in respect to Cipriani de Lloseta--when she was not feeling very well, perhaps. Her situation seemed to be somewhat that o...