The Market-Place

IN the Board Room, next day, Thorpe awaited the coming of Lord Plowden with the serene confidence of a prophet who not only knows that he is inspired, but has had an illicit gli...

It was both a flattering and striking experience to have so eminent a man at the side of one's desk, revealing for one's guidance the secrets of sovereigns and cabinets. Great n...

THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going prelude--with...

“It's the last day in the world that I should have thought you'd 'a' come out on,” she told them, in salutation--and for comment they all glanced along the dark narrow alley of...

For long weeks, Mr. Stormont Thorpe had given much thought to this approaching climax of his great adventure--looking forward to it both as the crowning event of his life, and a...

In this brief period, the two parties seemed to have become fused in a remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young people, and Thorpe congratulated hi...

He looked into her eyes and smiled, as he bowed over the hand she extended to him. His glance expressed with forceful directness his thought: “Ah, then she has told you!”

IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation from his deeply-root...

It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after the annou...

IT may be that every other passenger in that morning train to London nursed either a silent rage, or declaimed aloud to fellow-sufferers in indignation, at the time consumed in...

“Ah, I didn't know I was so thirsty,” he said, when he put the glass down. “Truth is--I've lost track of myself altogether since--since the big thing happened. I seem to be some...

THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery,...

THORPE'S life-long habit of early rising brought him downstairs next morning before anybody else in the house, apparently, was astir. At all events, he saw no one in either the...

So far as the payment of an exorbitant rent in advance, and the receipt of innumerable letters from a restless and fussy steward whom he had not yet seen, went as evidence, he k...

FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold it that she had not so much as unbutton...

BY the autumn of the following year, a certain small proportion of the people inhabiting the district in Hertfordshire which set its clocks by the dial over the stable-tower of...

FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed suddenly to have been transported t...

“We've got a spare room here, haven't we?” Thorpe asked his niece, when she came out to greet him in the hall of their new home in Ovington Square. He spoke with palpable eagern...

He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature, but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had a distinction of its own. His fac...

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low, rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted by two flickering gasjets. They sat somewhat apart, confronting a f...

GENERAL KERVICK was by habit a punctual man, and Thorpe found him hovering, carefully gloved and fur-coated, in the neighbourhood of the luncheon-room when he arrived. It indeed...

WHEN he had parted with Semple, at a corner where the busy broker, who had walked out with him, obviously fidgeted to get away, Thorpe could think of no one else in the City who...

The young people, with maps and a guide-book open, sat close together at the left side of the compartment. The girl from time to time rubbed the steam from the window with a nap...

His triumph was so sweeping and comprehensive as to be somewhat shapeless to the view. He had a sense of fascinated pain when he tried to define to himself what its limits would...

It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but he had slept very badly in it, none...

THORPE walked along, in the remoter out-of-the-way parts of the great gardens, as the first shadows of evening began to dull the daylight. For a long time he moved aimlessly abo...

“I DIDN'T ask your father, after all,” was one of the things that Thorpe said to his wife next day. He had the manner of one announcing a concession, albeit in an affable spirit...