The Imaginary Marriage

A fortnight had passed since Johnny Everard’s first visit to Starden, and during that time he had been again and yet again. He had never taken Ellice with him since that first t...

Mr. Tom Arundel, cheerful and happy-go-lucky, filled with an immense belief in a future which he was sure would somehow shape itself satisfactorily, felt a little hurt, a little...

“... I came to Starden because I believed you might need me. You did, and the help that you wanted I gave gladly and willingly. Now your enemy is removed; he can do you no more...

The pretty, frightened girl who shared the drawing-room at this moment with Lady Linden of Cornbridge Manor House had not dared to open her lips. But that was her ladyship’s way...

Women, chattering over their tea in the lounge of the Empire Hotel, followed the tall restless young man with their eyes. He was worth looking at, so big and fine, and bronzed,...

It seemed to Hugh Alston that he had not read the letter aright; it was so amazing, so disconcerting, that he felt bewildered. What on earth is wrong? he thought, then he took t...

“He has ideas. I don’t say that they are brilliant, but he gets the germ of a plan into his brain. And now I will tell you what he suggests about Partridge’s cottage and land wh...

At half-past nine on the Monday morning Miss Joan Meredyth walked into Mr. Slotman’s office, and Mr. Slotman, seeing her, turned his head aside to hide the smirk of satisfaction.

Restless and unhappy, Hugh Alston had returned to Hurst Dormer, to find there that everything was flat, stale, and unprofitable. He had an intense love for the home of his birth...

And Johnny, receiving his instructions, obeyed them without hesitation. Another moment, and Joan regretted. But it was too late, the car had gone on; the two figures, the man an...

“I daresay you will wonder at not having heard from me for so long, but I have been busy. Things have been going from bad to worse with me of late, and I have been obliged to gi...

“I came to see Joan Meredyth,” said Ellice quietly. She and Helen did not like one another; they were both frank in their dislike. Helen looked down on Ellice as a person of no...

Lady Linden, wearing a lilac printed cotton sunbonnet, her skirts pinned up about her, was busy with a trowel, disordering certain flower-beds that presently the gardeners would...

Helen Everard’s pleasant face was beaming. Her smile expressed complete contentment and satisfaction, for everything was going as everything should go. Johnny was an accepted lo...

Mr. Philip Slotman touched the electric buzzer on his desk and then watched the door. He was an unpleasant—looking man, strangely corpulent as to body, considering his face was...

Hugh Alston had raised his hat, and she had given him the coolest of bows. He was turning away, true to his promise to trouble her no more, and her heart seemed to cry out again...

Hugh Alston had certainly not attempted anything in the way of picturesque disguise. There was nothing brigandish or romantic about the appearance of the very ordinary-looking y...

Never so slowly as to-day had John Everard driven the six and a half miles that divided Buddesby and Little Langbourne from Starden. Never had his frank and open and cheerful fa...

“I did, and I haven’t done it—I’ll take the consequences.” But there were no consequences to take. She prepared him an ample meal at the shortest notice, and was willing enough...

“And you—you’ve given yourself airs, set yourself up to be all that you are not! You’ve held me at arm’s length, and all the time—all the time you’re nothing—nothing!” the man s...

He was hurt in mind, body, and estate; he was consumed by a great rage and a sense of injury. He had suffered, and someone should pay—Joan mainly, after Joan, Hugh Alston. But i...

“Why—why—why?” Ellice asked herself. Why should this woman who did not love him wish to take him away from her, who worshipped the ground he trod on, who looked up to him as the...

Buddesby, in the Parish of Little Langbourne, was a small place compared with Starden Hall. Buddesby claimed to be nothing more than a farmhouse of a rather exalted type. For ge...

Slotman was being shewn into the drawing-room a few moments later. He was wearing his best clothes and best manner. This Lady Linden was an aristocratic dame, and Mr. Slotman ha...

“My dear, my dear, life is short. I am an old man, and yet looking back it seems but yesterday since I was a boy beginning life. Climbing the hill, my dear, climbing the hill; a...

It was, Hugh Alston decided, the most beautiful face he had ever seen in his life and the coldest, or so it seemed to him. She was looking at him with cool questioning in her gr...

Starden Hall was one of those half-timbered houses in the possession of which Kent and Sussex are rich. It was no great mansion, but a comfortable, rambling old house, that had...

Joan frowned. Why had the General done that? Why had he, not three minutes ago, patted her on the shoulder, smiled on her, and told her to run down and wait for him in the drawi...

“Yes, child,” she said comfortably, “Colonel Arundel and I had a nice long talk last night, and you may guess what it was about. He and I were boy and girl together, there’s no...

Once again the big shabby old car stood waiting in the shadows, a quarter of a mile down the road, while he who hired it leaned against the gate under the shadow of the partly r...

He felt tongue-tied, more than usually awkward, terribly and shamefully nervous. Yet the grey eyes were on his face, and he knew that he must speak, must put all to the hazard....

“Don’t know it. I suppose I’d better see him. Wait, I’ll light the lamp. If Ellice isn’t back soon I shall go and hunt for her. Do you know which direction she went in?”

Why should Joan have been at Mrs. Bonner’s cottage at such an hour? Why should she have been there talking to the very man whom she had a week ago cut dead in the village? Why,...

Lady Linden had just come in from one of her usual and numerous inspections, during which she had found it necessary to reprove one of the under-gardeners. She had described him...

“She is utterly without generosity; she is cold and hard and bitter, and she has made a mountain out of a molehill, built up a great grievance on what was, after all, only a foo...

Joan and Constance Everard had taken a natural and instinctive liking for one another. But to-day it seemed to Connie that Joan was silent, less friendly, more thoughtful than u...

“I do not know,” Joan said. She had scarcely given a thought to Johnny Everard that morning. All her thoughts had been of two men, the men she had left in the darkness by the ro...

“My dear Connie!” Helen Everard was amazed. “My dear Connie, why talk such nonsense? This marriage between Joan and Johnny is the best, the very best possible thing in the world...

“Bless my soul!” said General Bartholomew. He had turned to the last page and looked at the signature. “Alicia Linden! I haven’t heard a word of her for five and twenty years. A...

For the first time since when, as a small, curly-headed boy, Hugh Alston had looked up at her ladyship with unclouded fearless eyes, that had appealed instantly to her, he and s...

Tom Arundel opened his eyes to the sunshine. He had left behind him a world of darkness and of pain, a curiously jumbled unreal world, in which it seemed to him that he had play...

Perhaps she was over-sensitive and a little unreasonable, but she would not admit it. She had been insulted by a man who had used her name lightly, who had proclaimed that he wa...

“According to promise I am writing to you hopeing it finds you as it leaves me at present. Dear sir, having some news I am writing to tell you saime. Yesterday Mr. John Everard...

Hugh Alston lingered in London, why, he would not admit, even to himself. In reality he had lingered on in the hope of seeing Joan Meredyth again. How he should see her, where a...

Into Hugh Alston’s life had come two women, women he had loved, both now engaged to be married to other men, and Hugh Alston was a sorely worried and perplexed man about both of...

It was like turning back the pages of a well-loved book, a breath out of the past. For this afternoon it seemed to John Everard that his little friend, almost sister, had come b...

“Of course. Hush! you must not talk. You are going to get well and strong again. The Matron says I am allowed to come sometimes and see you, and sit beside you, but you must not...

For a while the unrighteous may bask in the sunshine of prosperity, but there comes a time of reckoning, more especially in the City of London, and things were at this moment sh...