The Long Lane's Turning

The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam...

The girl whose gaze had for that instant found Harry Sevier's across the crowded court room left the place with her mind in a conflict of feeling. She was nonplussed. She had en...

An automobile speeding through the starry dark! No hesitant progress through congested traffic, no frequent swerving for daylight wayfarers. The city was far behind now--only th...

At Midfields that evening the late moonlight poured a flood of radiance on the wide columned porch with its climbing roses where Echo sat on the step, chin in hand, absorbed in...

On the ground floor of the old house all was silent save in the dining-room, where a single electric bulb threw into garish relief the dismantled table with a bowl of fern glowi...

In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand at his lips, as though he tasted blood. The summer night outside was very still. The curtain before one of...

Cameron Craig looked--at her, not at the blossom. She was in simple white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental, tuned to the wonder and passion of liv...

The "Farm," as the Country-Club was popularly known to its habitues, was a long, three-storied structure of red brick on the selvedge of the southern suburb, set in a grove of m...

Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire. In her resentment it had seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that slur upon the man she loved, and she...

Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy thoroughfare beneath. Outside was the spri...

From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked steadily at the Judge from under his...

The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which had been wont on past occasions to gather a...

An hour later Harry sat in the same pleasant room, looking out where curdled clouds set their silver sails in the pale shimmer of sky. A light breeze fluttered the figured-silk...

Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray on which was a little huddle of brow...

As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived long ago and discarded--as if she we...

In Harry Sevier's outer office his clerk glanced backward with a startled expression, his law-book dropping from his fingers. "That's queer," he muttered. "I never heard him lau...

The potations in the smoking-car had had their first effect. Sevier had passed from the jumbled dream now--was safe enisled in that strange fourth-dimensional empire into which...

With the sudden disintegration of the mental picture he had been tracing, and the instant stoppage of the tense action of mind and body, Harry Sevier came to himself. He awoke a...

"Accept!" He came toward her--would have taken her hands, but that she drew back. "Do you remember what I told you that day in your garden, a year ago--that nothing counted, not...

With that scream Harry's every nerve had become as tense as wire. In his mind's eye he saw her innocency tangled in this hideous web of burglary--perhaps of murder, her name on...

A half-hour later a surgeon and a nurse had been hurriedly summoned from the hospital, the wounded man had been carried to an upper chamber, and Harry Sevier set in a room acros...

The steel handcuff bit more hardly into Harry's wrist, but he did not feel it. His eyes were fixed and his face had grown grey. The accusation, with all its shuddering implicati...

"Hyuh yo' is, honey, smack-dab on time!" called 'Lige's cheery voice, as he took Echo's bag. "Yo' fo'got ter say which train yo' comin' back on yistiddy, so ah ben waitin' wid d...

June came with its gold-born days, its passionate bird-songs and scents of roses, its shimmer of willow and pine and burnished lustre of down-bent holly-leaves and its evening m...

The painful suggestions that had come to Echo over the teacups possessed her next day, when she drove with Nancy in the morning and in the afternoon, alone, selected her final s...

But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart bea...

Some miles beyond the skirt of the city, on the dusty highway, stood a vast wall of stone built four-square, along whose top, seen breast-high, men in dingy _khaki_ patrolled ba...

Echo sat under the Botticelli blue of a perfect afternoon on the terrace of the Hotel Splendid in Nice. Through the hot, bright air, set in the purple creases of the hazeless hi...

During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision the huge conglomerate of which he...

him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been turned?--because he who takes the sword sha...

The chill touch of autumn was in the air when the big steamer that brought Mrs. Spottiswoode and Echo home, crept up the bay to her wharf in the teeming North River. They arrive...

Lying in his bunk Harry awoke to the consciousness of another bleak dawn. The morning waking was always a pain to him, for in sleep the barriers fell away and the mind fared for...

Harry rose from his seat at the desk in the Record-Room and went over to the window. The frost had painted silver ferns and sea weed on its pane, and the prison yard, under the...

With the certainty of ancient practice he applied rouge and pencil deftly to his face, rubbing in a deeper tinge on the cheeks, shadowing the temples, accentuating by ever so li...

Echo stood at the gate of Midfields, her gloved hand delaying to close it, her eyes gazing down the featureless street along which yellow window-squares were beginning to spring...

In his little cabin, close by a big log-walled bungalow on a lonely slope of the Blue Ridge, now snugly frozen in by its winter snows, old "Jubilee Jim" lay in a deep sleep. The...

Harry stood in the doorway of the Bungalow, one hand shading his eyes, looking down the twisting trail to where, far below, a dark blotch toiled up the slope. During three days...

In the big living-room, now flooded with the mountain sunshine that streamed in through the open door, Richard Brent leaned to knock the ashes from his pipe against the end of t...

Looking back upon that day, Sevier was often to wonder whether indeed he had missed Fate's purpose, and blinded by a personal ambition, had set its plan at naught. For that inst...

To every man come portentous moments of decision so packed with fate that all that his after life may hold of pain or joy, seen with the clearer view of later knowledge, may wel...

Chisholm Allen had come to the end of a long tether. He was drunk. Not with the amiable jollity of the youthful tippler, nor with the heavy, fatuous oblivion of the sot, but wit...

"If I only knew!" That was Echo's mental cry in the long days that followed Chilly's burial. "If I only knew whether Harry cared for me any longer!" Sharp as was her grief for h...

Dr. Ivany, the great Hungarian specialist, adept in the delicate adventurings of brain surgery, ceased his examination and refastened the light bandage upon his patient's head w...

"I am considering the evidence as you present it, that's all. This, it seems to me, is what it amounts to: Mr. Henry Sevier, a reputable citizen and a well known resident of thi...

In the Warden's office at the Penitentiary next morning--the same room Harry Sevier had entered when he had first stepped under the gloomy prison archway--Craig stood staring ou...

The elevator deposited Harry at the third floor, where was the suite of rooms that he had occupied while in town during the campaign, as being more accessible than his own apart...

Sevier had stepped back as they entered. He had not been startled at the ambush; he had gone past surprises. He was conscious only of a cold preparedness and a kind of dull wond...

In the wide, lamp-lighted room into which this weird quartette had so startlingly entered, before the capacious fireplace two men had been sitting smoking--Judge Allen and his f...

For an instant there was a blank silence. The Judge sat as if stunned, one hand across his lips, the other clenched on his knee. Harry's breath had caught in his throat; he stoo...

Its effect on Paddy the Brick was instantaneous. He drew back, his hand clutching at the curtains. He was looking not at Echo, but past her, at the Governor, who had risen tower...

With her eyes upon him she moved away with uncertain, backward steps. When she spoke again it was with a quick breath that was like a sob, and in a voice scarcely audible, with...