The Key to Yesterday

The palings of the grandstand inclosure creaked in protest under the pressure. The shadows of forward-surging men wavered far out across the track. A smother of ondriving dust b...

"His career has been pretty much a march of successive triumphs through the world of art, and he has left the critics only one peg on which to hang their carping."

Perhaps, the same futile vanity that led Mr. Bellton to import the latest sartorial novelties from the _Rue de la Paix_ for the adornment of his person made him fond of providin...

Steele himself had not been a failure at his art. There was in him no want of that sensitive temperament and dream-fire which gives the artist, like the prophet, a better sight...

Horton House, where Duska Filson made her home with her aunt and uncle, was a half-mile from the cabin in which the two painters were lodged. That was the distance reckoned via...

For more than a week after the ride to the cliff, Duska withdrew herself from the orbit in which Saxon revolved, and the man, feeling that she wished to dismiss him, in part at...

A short time ago, Saxon had felt stronger than all the forces of fate. He had believed that circumstances were plastic and man invincible. Now, as he bent forward in his chair,...

When he reached the cabin, Saxon found Steele still awake. The gray advance-light of dawn beyond the eastern ridges had grown rosy, and the rosiness had brightened into the blue...

Puerto Frio sits back of its harbor, a medley of corrugated iron roofs, adobe walls and square-towered churches. Along the water front is a fringe of ragged palms. At one end of...

At the Palace, the Americans were separated. Saxon was ushered into a small room, barely furnished. Its one window was barred, and the one door that penetrated its thick wall wa...

Saxon denied himself the lure of the deck that evening. Though he would probably be close behind his messages in arriving, he was devoting himself to a full narration embodied i...

Below, in the narrow confines of the cabin, Saxon paced back and forth excitedly as he talked. For five minutes, he did not pause, and the other man, sitting on the camp-stool i...

The passing of the fugitive _insurrectos_; their mad turning at bay for one savage rally; their wavering and breaking; their disorganized stampede spurred on by a decimating fir...

When Duska Filson had gone out into the woods that day to read Saxon's runaway letter, she had at once decided to follow, with regal disdain of half-way methods. To her own stra...

Captain Harris had been, like Rodman, one of the men who make up the world's flotsam and jetsam. He, too, had meddled in the affairs of that unstable belt which lies just above...

Late one evening in the cafe beneath the Elysee Palace Hotel, a tall man of something like thirty-five, though aged to the seeming of a bit more, sat over his brandy and soda an...

In the compartment of the railway carriage, Steele was gazing fixedly at the lace "tidy" on the cushioned back of the opposite seat. His brows were closely knit in thought. He w...

On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the _Boulevard St. Michel_, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after...

Late that afternoon, in Mrs. Horton's drawing-room at the _Hotel Palais d'Orsay_, Steele stood at the window, his gaze almost sullen in the moodiness of his own ineffectual symp...

When he turned back, a day later, from the turmoil of the station, from the strenuous labor of weighing trunks, locating the compartment in the train, subsidizing the guards, an...

When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the _Promenade des Anglais_ at Nice, it was a much improved and rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature...