The Lamp of Fate

Lady Arabella’s big rooms were filling rapidly. The dinner to which only a few of the elect had been bidden was over, and now those who had been invited to the less exclusive re...

A sudden warning shout, the transient glare of fog-blurred headlights, then a crash and a staggering blow on the car’s near side which sent it reeling like a drunken thing, bonn...

At breakfast, some hours later, Magda was in a curiously petulant and uncertain mood. To some extent her fractiousness was due to natural reaction after the emotional excitement...

“Yes, I suppose so,” replied Gillian absently, her eyes following the queue of passengers passing through the gate on the platform. By mutual consent they had come to a standsti...

The birth of a daughter came upon Hugh in the light of an almost overwhelming shock. He was quite silent when, in response to Catherine’s imperative gesture, he surrendered the...

Winter had slipped away, pushed from his place by the tender, resistless hands of spring. And now spring had given place to summer, and June, arms filled with flowers, was conve...

Magda hardly knew what impulse had bidden her save Dan Storran from himself--check the hot utterance to which he had so nearly given voice and which to a certain extent she had...

With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at Friars’ Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired in north London.

When first Magda had bruited her idea of rejoining the sisterhood--the decision which had crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars’ Holm--Gi...

Day by day her husband’s complete estrangement from her was rendered additionally bitter to Diane by Catherine’s complacent air of triumph. The latter knew that she had won, sev...

Lady Arabella was in her element. She had two brilliant and unattached young men dining with her--one, Michael Quarrington, a lion in the artistic world, and the other, Antoine...

The joyous excitement and relief incidental to the safe return of the voyagers had spent itself at last, and now, refreshed and invigorated by a hot bath and by a meal of more v...

Shouts of mirth came jubilantly from the Mirror Room as Davilof made his way thither one afternoon a few days later. The shrill peal of a child’s laughter rose gaily above the l...

Coppertop’s excited voice, shrilling across the garden as he came racing over the grass, put an abrupt end to a scene that was threatening to develop along the familiar tempestu...

The season was drawing to its close. London lay sweltering under a heat-wave which had robbed the trees in the Park of their fresh June greenness and converted the progress of f...

It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her curiously--at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything...

The chintzy bedroom under the sloping roof was very still and quiet. The moonlight, streaming in through the open casement, revealed the bed unoccupied, its top-sheet neatly fol...

Magda glanced from the divan covered with a huge tiger-skin to Michael, wheeling his easel into place. A week’s hard work on the part of the artist had witnessed the completion...

The curtains swung together for the last time, the orchestra struck up the National Anthem, and the great audience which had come from all parts to witness the Wielitzska’s fare...

As she spoke Magda leaned back luxuriously against her cushions and glanced smilingly across at Michael where he sat with his hand on the tiller of the _Bella Donna_, the little...

Magda sat gazing idly into the fire, watching with abstracted eyes the flames leap up and curl gleefully round the fresh logs with which she had just fed it. She was thinking ab...

For the first month or two after Magda’s departure Gillian found that she had her hands full in settling up various business and personal matters which had been left with loose...

Magda slipped through the tall doorway in the wall which marked the abode of the Sisters of Penitence and stood once more on the pavement of the busy street. The year was over,...

Lady Arabella paused in her knitting and spoke petulantly, but a secret gleam of admiration in her sharp old eyes as they rested upon her god-daughter belied the irritation of h...

Michael and Magda stood together on the deck of the crippled yacht which now rocked idly on a quite placid sea. Dusk was falling. That first glorious, irrecoverable hour when lo...

The long, interminable night was over at last. Never afterwards, all the days of her life, could Magda look back on the black horror of those hours without a shudder. She felt a...

“Heaven knows you’re not!” agreed Gillian ruefully. “It would be a wholesome tonic for you if you were. I told you only yesterday that it would be better if we left here. And on...

Diane sat in the twilight, brooding. Winter had come round again, gripping the world with icy fingers, and she shivered a little as she crouched in front of the fire.

It was a glorious morning. The sun blazed like a great golden shield out of a cloudless sky, and hardly a breath of air stirred the foliage of the trees.

As Gillian mingled once more with the throng on the pavements she felt curiously unwilling to return home. She had set out from Friars’ Holm so full of hope in her errand! It ha...

Gillian was sitting alone in the yew-hedged garden, her slim fingers busy repairing the holes which appeared with unfailing regularity in the heels of Coppertop’s stockings. Fro...

Magda’s dressing-room at the Imperial Theatre was something rather special in the way of dressing-rooms. It had been designed expressly for her by the management, and boasted a...

Hugh Vallincourt stood at the window of his study, staring out with unseeing eyes at the smooth, shaven lawns and well-kept paths with their background of leafless trees. It see...

Lady Arabella might disapprove of her god-daughter from every point of the compass, but she was nevertheless amazingly fond of her, so that when Gillian appeared on her spotless...

Magda felt a sudden stab of fear. The sound of the latch clicking into its place brought home to her the irrevocability of the step she had taken. That tall, self-locking door s...

Her first impulse had been to refuse to meet him. Then the temptation to see him again--just once more--before she passed out of his life altogether, rushed over her like the su...