Category: Romance

The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton

Miracle, by St. Peter out of Three-to-a-Flush, a thoroughbred chestnut not quite good enough for steeple-chasing but considerably too good for that very quiet hunt, the Mid-Oxfordshire, was just out of his box, and pretty fresh. Looking over the flint wall which separated the...

Chapters

30. CHAPTER XXX

For Ronald Cavendish, the fortnight which intervened between his briefing and the Monday of the trial passed like an hour. All that he had ever hoped for seemed at last within r...

37. CHAPTER XXXVII

The sun had already set. The Embankment showed steel-gray and violet; fantastic under a fantastic sky. Trams clanged by her. Taxis. Cars. She did not see them. She did not see L...

1. CHAPTER I

Miracle, by St. Peter out of Three-to-a-Flush, a thoroughbred chestnut not quite good enough for steeple-chasing but considerably too good for that very quiet hunt, the Mid-Oxfo...

17. CHAPTER XVII

The dahlias in Hyde Park died, cut down by the frost; and with the death of them there came over Aliette that keen longing for the countryside in winter-time which only English...

15. CHAPTER XV

Aliette, masking her anxiety, drove him to the station; and for nearly an hour after the slow train left Chilton Junction he visualized nothing except her pale, exquisite face a...

2. CHAPTER II

"You can't possibly want to brush it any more, Caroline." Aliette's maid, a square-hipped, square-shouldered, square-faced woman who had been in service with the Fullerford fami...

4. CHAPTER IV

Julia Cavendish was always at home on Saturday afternoons. You used to meet nearly all social sorts and conditions of men and women in that exquisitely tended Bruton Street hous...

33. CHAPTER XXXIII

Hector Brunton tottered out of his car and up the steps into his chambers like a man in a palsy. Three clients were waiting in the outer office for consultations. He told Patter...

35. CHAPTER XXXV

They were burying that flesh which had been Julia Cavendish among the cypresses of the South London cemetery whither she brought back the flesh which had been Ronnie's father wh...

14. CHAPTER XIV

It was ten o'clock of a great July day. From outside, through the low foliaged casement of Honeysuckle Cottage, sounded the drone of a bee, the whine and splash of the well-buck...

21. CHAPTER XXI

Ever since the contretemps at Patrick O'Riordan's first-night--although his sense of family solidarity would have given much to admit his eldest son entirely in the right--Rear-...

34. CHAPTER XXXIV

It was past eight o'clock, and the Temple curiously quiet. Ronnie, kindling himself a pipe and leaning back in his battered armchair, heard his clerk's boot-soles hurrying throu...

3. CHAPTER III

Temple Bar was removed about forty years since; but if you traverse the Strand, and, leaving the jostle of the Strand behind you, venture on--past Mr. Gladstone's statue and the...

9. CHAPTER IX

Yet, even relenting, she knew that she could never forgive. The physical Hector was dead, killed by her knowledge of his infidelities--as dead to her as the physical Ronnie was...

10. CHAPTER X

Yet within twelve hours of Aliette's interview with Hector, even Caroline Staley realized that "Miss Aliette was about through with that husband of hers." Lennard and the rest o...

25. CHAPTER XXV

For three days and nights of morphia she drowsed away the effects of that first hemorrhage. Heron Baynet, returning hot-foot to Harley Street on his secretary's telegram, insist...

11. CHAPTER XI

"Aliette dear: You asked me not to hurry you. I've tried to be patient; but life without you has become impossible. I can't see what duty either of us owes to anybody except eac...

16. CHAPTER XVI

She was often alone now. That curious "London" which an eclectic woman of means can gather about herself by the time she reaches sixty had begun to desert. Brunton had done noth...

8. CHAPTER VIII

To a certain type of mind, the woman who goes to a man's rooms is already labeled. It seems therefore necessary to explain that Aliette--when she suggested going to Ronnie's--ac...

32. CHAPTER XXXII

Ronnie, shaking off Spillcroft, spent the luncheon adjournment alone. His bouts with the last witnesses, followed by the shock of Bert Bishop's proof, had rattled him. As he was...

13. CHAPTER XIII

But soon the letter grew real enough--so real that Julia's imagination, peering between the lines, could actually see him with the woman who had inspired it; with the woman who...

27. CHAPTER XXVII

Jimmy's two-seater was suffering from one of its usual breakdowns. That red-haired young man, instructing his porter to put his bag into a first-class smoker, had no idea of the...

24. CHAPTER XXIV

Waking, she knew that she had fallen asleep by the open window; that somebody was knocking on the outer door of the flat, somebody who called insistently, "Mr. Cavendish, Mr. Ca...

28. CHAPTER XXVIII

Next morning, Saturday, after breakfast, a very subdued Jimmy and Mollie broke the news of their formal engagement. To both of them the events of overnight, remembered in the pr...

23. CHAPTER XXIII

The charge against Mrs. Cairns was murder; and for days no newspaper dared to omit a single comma from its reports of the case. For days Hector's bewigged photograph blazed on t...

31. CHAPTER XXXI

Walking back alone to the "ridiculous flat," Ronald Cavendish was oppressed with a sense of his own inefficiency. Even though his intuitive suspicions about Maggie Peterson's ho...

12. CHAPTER XII

At gaze into the sun-dazzle, Ponto's slitty eyes could just discern the twin rock buttresses of Chilworth Cove, the sea-water eddying translucent between them, and, forging thro...

36. CHAPTER XXXVI

Two more days, terrible days for them both, went by. To Aliette it seemed as though all her courage, all her clear-visioning mentality, had ebbed away. Everything terrified her;...

19. CHAPTER XIX

Every year, toward the end of November, Betty Masterman had been accustomed to receive an invitation to spend Christmas at Clyst Fullerford. This year, to her surprise, she rece...

20. CHAPTER XX

Before, and even during the war, Christmas day at Bruton Street used to be rather a function. On that day, Julia, still the feudalist in her domestic policy, was wont to rise ea...

18. CHAPTER XVIII

Within one week of its first launching, "Khorassan" sank, leaving hardly a ripple, into the deep pool of theatrical failures. But for weeks and weeks thereafter, that shallow po...

6. CHAPTER VI

"If Aliette hadn't given up the game to do war-work, and if I hadn't got cut over by that bomb, we might have done some good together in the club doubles," said Mollie Fullerford.

29. CHAPTER XXIX

"There is always," says Bertram Standon in his book "How I Fought Fleet Street," "a psychological news-moment. To be premature with news is even worse than to be dilatory with i...

7. CHAPTER VII

When Aliette looks back on the three days that followed her lover's first avowal, she can only see herself moving in a strange, rapt exhilaration from room to room of Hector's g...

26. CHAPTER XXVI

Only those who have tended their loved ones through long illnesses know how at such times hour slides into hour, eventless save for the notches on the temperature-chart, for the...

22. CHAPTER XXII

Even average people, when obsessed by the grand passion--which is a far rarer passion among Anglo-Saxons than Anglo-Saxon novelists would have us believe--cannot be judged by av...

5. CHAPTER V

She attended a terrific _tamasha_ of a wedding--all frocks and roses--at St. George's, Hanover Square; she dined at the Carlton with Hector and a sumptuous client from the money...