The Immortal Moment: The Story of Kitty Tailleur

Her tense, flushed mind recorded automatically, and with acute vividness, every detail of the room; the pattern of the gray French wall-paper, with the watered stripe, and of th...

It was not the thing she had confessed to him, fear of his little unseen children, it was terror, unconfessed, uncomprehended, as it were foreknowledge of the very soul of desti...

Marston cancelled that appointment at Whitehall. Somebody else's business would have to wait another day, that was all. He was wont to settle affairs as they arose, methodically...

She had had no intention of betraying Kitty. Kitty, she imagined, had sufficiently betrayed herself. And if she hadn't, as long as Kitty chose to behave like a dubious person, s...

Colonel Hankin was mistaken. Mrs. Tailleur's room was not wanted the next day. The point had been fiercely disputed in those obscure quarters of the hotel inhabited by the manag...

It was morning. She dragged herself up and tried to dress. But her hands shook and her head ached violently. She stretched herself half-dressed upon her bed and lay there helple...

Kitty was dressed. She was calling out to her companion, "Bunny, hurry up, you'll be late." No answer came from the adjoining room. She tapped at the door and there was no answe...

Five days passed. The Lucys had now been a week at Southbourne. They knew it well by that time, for bad weather kept them from going very far beyond it. Jane had found, too, tha...

They came into the hotel dining-room like young persons making their first entry into life. They carried themselves with an air of subdued audacity, of innocent inquiry. When th...

She had left them to each other. It was eight o'clock. She had crept back again to the bed that was her refuge, where she had lain for the last hour, weeping to exhaustion. She...

She had made her escape from the great, lighted lounge behind her where the men were sitting. She had found a corner out of sight of its wide windows. She knew that Kitty Taille...

She stared at her own face in the glass without seeing it. Her brain was filled with the loud, hurried ticking of the clock. It sounded somehow as if it were out of gear. She fe...

It was not from Marston, then, that she had to fear betrayal. Neither was she any more afraid of the rumours of the Cliff Hotel. She was aware that her engagement to Robert Lucy...

"Do you hear that?" said Kitty. "It's Wilfrid Marston walking up and down. He wants to get hold of me. I think he's mad about me. He asked me to marry him just now, and I wouldn...

At eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side looking for her. He was not able to acc...

Lucy's mind was like his body. Superficial people called it narrow, because the sheer length of it diverted their attention from its breadth. Visionary, yet eager for the sound...

The next day it rained, fitfully at first, at the will of a cold wind that dragged clouds out of heaven. A gleam of sunshine in the afternoon, then wild rain driven slantwise by...

She came to meet him, keeping her back to Marston, her face thrust a little forward in the way it had, looking for the protection of Robert's kind eyes. Only when she had his ha...

Five minutes later Lucy was talking to Colonel and Mrs. Hankin, with genial unconcern. They never knew that he knew what they had been saying, or how their tongues had scourged...

It could not be denied that Kitty had a charm. Miss Keating was not denying it, even now, when she was saying to herself that Kitty had a way of attracting very disagreeable att...

The awkward thing was telling Jane about it. Jane had been his dead wife's friend before he married her, and she had known her better then than she knew Kitty. Yet he remembered...

He did not leave her. They sat still, separated by the length of the little room, staring, not at each other, but at some point in the distance, as if each brain had flung and f...