The Heart of Penelope

'L'Amour est comme la dévotion: il vient tard. On n'est guère amoureuse ni devote à vingt ans ... les prédestinées elles-mêmes luttent longtemps contre cette grace d'aimer, plus...

Cecily Wake had not been brought up by her aunt. Even before the death of her father, which had followed that of her mother at an interval of some years, she had been placed in...

The next morning Cecily Wake and her aunt left Monk's Eype. Strange, unhappy morning! during which Mrs. Robinson alone preserved her usual indifferent, haughty serenity of manne...

Above, close to the window of a high narrow room which had once been the Catholic Lord Wantley's oratory, and which was next to the bedroom always occupied by Penelope herself,...

There are moments in the life of almost every human being when the sands seem to be running out, when even the most careless, the least scrupulous, feels a pang at the thought o...

'If you enter his house, his drawing-room, his library, you of yourself say, This is not the dwelling of a common mind. There is not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his ch...

Kingpole Farm was built at a time when loneliness was not feared, as it has come to be, by the poor and by the workers of rural England, and, if one can trust to outward signs,...

All over the East, and even nearer home, on the Continent, old women take a great place, and are even permitted to play a great rôle, in the human affairs of those about them. H...

'There was a Door to which I found no Key: There was a Veil past which I could not see: Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee There seem'd--and then no more of Thee and Me.' OM...

Sir George Downing was back in London after an absence of twenty years from England. The circumstances which had led to his leaving his native country had been such that he coul...

'But there's one happy moment when the mind Is left unguarded, waiting to be kind, Which the wise lover understanding right, Steals in like day upon the wings of light.'

When Penelope Wantley became the mistress of Monk's Eype, she left the villa as she had always known it, for her sense of beauty compelled her to approve the few changes which h...

MEN. Seen! Why, the Valley itself, which is as dark as pitch; we also saw there the Hobgoblins, Satyrs and Dragons of the Pit; we heard also in that Valley a continuous Howling...

Lady Wantley, as she journeyed up to town, tended very kindly by her companion, who possessed the power the normal man often lacks of making any woman in his charge feel comfort...

The Rectory at Shagisham had the great charm of situation. In his study old Mr. Winfrith stood on the same level as the top of his church steeple, and his windows commanded wide...

That Sir George Downing should spend the last days of his sojourn in Dorset at Kingpole Farm, a seventeenth-century homestead, where, according to local tradition, Charles II. h...

With his hands in his pockets, his head slightly thrown back, standing in a characteristic attitude, the young man watched them drive away in the curious low dogcart which had b...

'For a pinte of honey thou shalt here likely find a gallon of gaul, for a dram of pleasure a pound of pain, for an inch of mirth an ell of mone: as Ivie doth an oke, these miser...

The next morning poor Cecily felt strangely forlorn. Somehow, this did not seem like Christmas Day. Wantley, haggard, but smiling, after his long night's vigil, had declared tha...