The Heath Hover Mystery

The way in which the two accepted the situation was characteristic of both. Mervyn took it apparently as all in the day's work, though he had reason to believe that his days wer...

A fortnight had gone since Melian's arrival at Heath Hover, and she had picked up to such an extent that both she and her uncle found it difficult to realise that she had been s...

The master of Heath Hover had just drawn up the blind of his bedroom window, and was gazing out upon a morning of unrivalled and cloudless beauty, for the year had grown apace,...

Every nerve rigid and tense Mervyn listened again. Yes--it was repeated. It echoed forth more distinctly now upon the dismal night, and it came from far up the great pond above....

"In the morning," the doctor had said. What a deal of difference those three words can cover. In this instance Melian had passed a quiet night, thanks to his prescription, but w...

If ever a country ramble was a success, a grand success, that one was. In the gnarled oak-wood dim in cool gloom, comparative, as regarded the flood of sunshine outside, the gir...

The year had dawned more and more into daylight if not correspondingly into warmth, and for Melian life had become more of a settled thing at Heath Hover. So far she was content...

Mervyn's camp was pitched not very far from the mouth of the Duran Tangi; that is, not very far from the scene of the sniping episode of a week or two previously, of which, of c...

The Carstairs abode was a large, dull, ugly villa in a large, dull, ugly suburb--one of those depressing suburbs that is neither town nor country but has the disadvantages of bo...

Overhead the gloomy rock walls reared up on either side for many hundred feet, seeming in places well nigh to meet, in others, leaning outward so as completely to obliterate the...

The camp was pitched in open ground, and had the drawback of that--for there were no shading trees or sheltering heights, as to which Varne Coates remarked that it didn't matter...

High up amid the soaring pinnacles of the craggy world Helston Varne and his shikari were worming their way in stealthy silence, now round a corner where every hand and foothold...

They had left the outskirts of the town behind, and were bowling along a tree-hung road, which in summer would have been a green tunnel. The brown woods stood out above the whit...

"I'm thinking we can about decide to give up the Heath Hover business as a bad job," said Inspector Nashby to his auxiliary, one night as they sat over whisky and water and pipe...

About lunch-time a smart dogcart came bowling along the snow covered road, and from it descended the doctor and the police inspector, likewise a constable: old Joe, with his slo...

It might have been somewhere in the middle of the morning, or a trifle earlier, that Mervyn, from his bedroom window descried a well-looking, comfortably-dressed stranger leisur...

It was a glowing, beautiful summer, and as each radiant day succeeded another, it seemed to Melian a difficult thing to realise her former life, so completely had that passed aw...

She looked genuinely distressed, worse still--genuinely frightened. She almost pushed past him in her anxiety to get into the full light, and he noticed a quick movement of half...

"No, I will not." And the speaker's lips tightened, and her blue eyes met the angry red brown ones calm and full, and the coronal of golden hair shone upon a very erect head ind...

The red fires shot up against shining rock reflection, throwing out exaggerations or silhouettes of the shaggy figures moving about. Wild, fantastic, as the surrounding crags we...

"Yes, I do know. I was admiring your scientific enthusiasm in the cause of `old stones,' as my niece calls them, that induced you to stick it all that time."

The morning broke, bright and clear, one of those rare winter mornings without a cloud in the blue, and the sun making additional patterns through the frost facets on the window...

John Seward Mervyn was seated within the same armchair in which we first saw him gazing at the mysterious and shadowy door in the corner--but now it was the middle of a brillian...

A puff of damp air came down the slope, driving the vapour before it, and bringing a hard, unpleasant downpour. But this mattered little now. The great thing was to be able to d...

Even as Violet had said, to put such a superhuman strain upon the curiosity of two mere women seemed scarcely fair, and perhaps the hardest strain of all was Mervyn's injunction...

Yes--stone dead. There could be no possible mistake about it. Mervyn touched the face. It was icy cold. But how on earth could this have befallen? The man had seemed as well as...

The hitherto glowering, menacing countenances, had all of a sudden taken on a heavy, vacuous expression. The stare of the fierce eyes had become dull and lack-lustre. Even the f...

Heath Hover was a long, two-storeyed house built in the shape of the letter E with the centre bar left out. Nobody knew exactly how it had ever come to be built at all. The prop...

The room was of medium size, partly panelled, and partly hung with dark red papering. It was low ceiled, and the bending beams between the strips of whitewash were almost black....

John Seward Mervyn lay back in his accustomed armchair and puffed very contentedly at his pipe. The fire burned clearly in the deep, old-fashioned fireplace, and the room looked...