The Invisible Foe A Story Adapted from the Play by Walter Hackett

Richard Bransby was breaking. He could not bear much more, and he knew it. He had felt very faint at lunch. Latham would have driven him to his bed, but Latham had been again lu...

Begun half in fun, the pretty widow’s advance towards the physician had grown a little out of her own entire control, and she found herself in some danger of being hoist by her...

When Latham returned to the library he found Helen sitting by the writing-table, one hand lying idly and resting on the jade paper weight. He spoke to her, and she looked up and...

“You have,” Mrs. Latham returned cordially. “But you know what Mrs. Hemans says, or perhaps it’s Mark Twain, I always get them mixed, ‘the labor we delight in physics pain’—I’ve...

She scarcely heard his last words, or realized that he had gone. She stood very still, one hand on the table—one on her breast. There was something trance-like in the tense, sle...

Helen and her father were alone in the library when the brothers joined them. She felt that her father meant to “have it out” then, and she was glad. For him and for her the ten...

Bransby watched Grant under beetling brows, his thin lips set, stiff and angry. He valued his money. He had earned it hard, and to be robbed of a farthing had always enraged him...

The same group was gathered in the same room just twenty-three hours later. But Mrs. Leavitt, detained last night on one of her many domestic cares (she never had learned to wea...

He was the only guest: it goes without saying, and Latham himself had hoped for nothing else. That he foreknew that it would be a function strictly for two had both assuaged and...

Mrs. Leavitt had not noticed the physician go. She had not been listening for some time, the turn of her pattern had been at its most difficult point. But she had managed it, an...

As the fussy, bustling footsteps died away Stephen sank into an easy-chair—Richard’s own, as it chanced—and laid his head on a table. He was worn out with tension and uncertainty.

Mrs. Leavitt was delighted. It was lonely at Deep Dale—very lonely sometimes. For the first time in his life Stephen was sorry to see his cousin. Her visit, he felt, foreboded n...

As Helen and Hugh came singing up the path, Bransby was driving Grant from the door. It was no friendliness that had led him to speed his visitor so far, but a desire to see if...

Neither followed him, and Stephen did not even call after him “not to linger in the hall, running the risk of being seen,” but turned at once to Helen, who sat brooding and puzz...

But no father came to her call, no companion from the void to her tryst. She waited, feeling, or thinking that she felt, the air touch her hair, brush her face, cool but kindly,...

Stephen, might he have followed his own bent, would have studied only those things which promised to coach him toward aviation in all its branches and corollaries. But Richard w...

Mrs. Latham pushed a chair to the bed, and Hugh sat down awkwardly, and put down on the small table near Stephen’s pillow a parcel. Stephen eyed it quizzically. “Grapes,” Hugh r...

“Did we, dear? Then old Hugh owes me a bob.” As the words left his lips, a sudden spasm of memory caught him. Helen saw nothing, but Latham took a quick half-step towards him.

Stephen was not happy. He was loving but not lovable—on the surface at least. He was sensitive to a fault, brooding, secretive. He had loved his mother dearly, and Hugh had been...

She looked in the fire. She counted the clock’s ticking. She gazed at the Joss. What should she do? She asked them all that. What ought Hugh to do? They gave her no answer, no h...

Richard Bransby had few friends because he tolerated few. Unloving towards most, rather than unlovable, his life and his personality cut deep, but in narrow channels. To him pic...

The spring waxed into radiant molten summer, mocking with its lush of flower-life, its trill of bird-voice, its downpouring of sunshine, the agony of the nations, and the pitifu...

In a little room high up in the house, her very own sitting-room, heaped with roses and heliotrope and carnations, its windows looking out to the Surrey hills and a gurgling bro...

Stephen lay on his stomach, one sharp elbow comfortable in a velvet bed of moss, his chin cupped in his palm, his beautifully shaped head thrown back, his alert face lifted to t...

It was not a boisterous meal. There was not a naturally noisy person there. Bransby was too cold, Stephen too sensitive, Hugh too heavy, to be given to the creation of noise. Mr...

Even Stephen watching jealously—he had known of the _tête-à-tête_ of the morning—learned nothing. And Caroline Leavitt rejoiced and was grateful to see the girl so much more nea...

The wretched man sat helpless in the grip of his terror. Cold puffs of air buffeted his trembling face. A hand of ice lay on his forehead. Afraid of what he almost saw dimly, an...

Too amazed to speak, too stunned to think, Hugh Pryde stood rigid—dumfounded. Helen was breathing rapidly, her breast rising and falling in great heaves, waves of alternate shad...

Of course any feeling of security built upon so slight foundation, and concerning a matter of such paramount and vital moment, could but be transient. With the next daylight, dr...

One evening, early in the autumn of 1916, Morton Grant passed nervously by the lodge of Deep Dale, and along the carriage drive that twisted and curled to the house.

The two stricken men parted then, one going down the road with slouched shoulders and aimless gait, feeling more than such a type of such years and so circumstanced often has to...

Often life seems one long series of interruptions; and, more often than not, interruptions are petty and annoying. That it is our inconsequential acquaintances who interrupt us...

Richard Bransby had amassed a fortune and perfected a fad, but he had amassed no friends. In the thirty-five years in which he had gathered and nursed his fortune (for he began...

“Of course,” Latham continued, “some of it—much of it—sounds incredible—beyond belief—and yet—well, some years ago wireless telegraphy, the telephone, a hundred other things tha...

Hugh nodded. “Oh, yes—and he’ll behave very decently to me—they usually do in such cases—and a good deal is left to their discretion. Undoubtedly it’s a non-com. and a trusted o...

The jade Joss had the room to himself. There was little enough light and no fire. Gray shadows hung thick in the place, palpable and dreary. The blinds were down and the curtain...

For a long time neither spoke, or moved. Then Hugh held out his arms, and Helen came into them. And still neither spoke. The old clock ticked the moments, and the beat of their...

Angela Hilary was half crying, half laughing, when she danced into the drawing-room. The tea still stood on the low table, steam still hissed from the kettle. But only Latham wa...

“None, of course,” he admitted; “the strain has lasted so long it’s on my nerves. Oh,” he broke out anew, “if I could only think where to look now. But I can’t—I can’t.” He look...

They laid him in his coffin almost as they found him. Helen insisted that it be so. Much that when dead we usually owe to strange hands, to professional kindliness, the girl, wh...