The Marquis of Lossie

The next day the reading was resumed, and for several days was regularly continued. Each day, as their interest grew, longer time was devoted to it. They were all simple enough...

The heroes of Scaurnose expected a renewal of the attack, and in greater force, the next day, and made their preparations accordingly, strengthening every weak point around the...

The sermon Lady Clementina heard with such delight had followed one levelled at the common and right worldly idea of success harboured by each, and unquestioned by one of the ch...

He rose early the next morning, and having fed and dressed Kelpie, strapped her blanket behind her saddle, and, by all the macadamized ways he could find, rode her to the wharf-...

It was two days after the longest day of the year, when there is no night in those regions, only a long twilight, in which many dream and do not know it. There had been a week o...

What with rats and mice, and cats and owls, and creaks and cracks, there was no quiet about the place from night to morning; and what with swallows and rooks, and cocks and kine...

Malcolm had not yet, after all the health-giving of the voyage, entirely recovered from the effects of the ill-compounded potion. Indeed, sometimes the fear crossed his mind tha...

There came a breath of something in the east. It was neither wind nor warmth. It was light before it is light to the eyes of men. Slowly and slowly it grew, until, like the dawn...

That same evening, Duncan, in full dress, claymore and dirk at his sides, and carrying the great Lossie pipes, marched first through the streets of the upper, then through the c...

The sermon Mr Graham heard at the chapel that Sunday morning in Kentish Town was not of an elevating, therefore not of a strengthening description. The pulpit was at that time i...

The next day at noon, mounted on Kelpie, Malcolm was in attendance upon his mistress, who was eager after a gallop in Richmond Park. Lord Liftore, who had intended to accompany...

When the earl saw Malcolm coming, although he was no coward, and had reason to trust his skill, yet knowing himself both in the wrong and vastly inferior in strength to his enem...

The evening came; and the company at Lossie House was still seated at table, Clementina heartily weary of the vapid talk that had been going on all through the dinner, when she...

Lady Clementina had to return to England to see her lawyers, and arrange her affairs. Before she went, she would gladly have gone with Malcolm over every spot where had passed a...

That night Florimel had her thoughts as well as Malcolm. Already life was not what it had been to her, and the feeling of a difference is often what sets one a-thinking first. W...

At last they glided once more through the stony jaws of the harbour, as if returning again to the earth from a sojourn in the land of the disembodied. When Clementina’s foot tou...

Florimel had found her daring visit to Lenorme stranger and more fearful than she had expected: her courage was not quite so masterful as she had thought. The next day she got M...

Clementina was always ready to accord any reasonable request Florimel could make of her; but her letter lifted such a weight from her heart and life that she would now have done...

When Malcolm took Kelpie to her stall the night of the arrival of Lady Bellair and her nephew, he was rushed upon by Demon, and nearly prostrated between his immoderate welcome...

Florimel was beginning to understand that the shield of the portrait was not large enough to cover many more visits to the studio. Still she must and would venture; and should a...

And now followed a pleasant time. Wastbeach was the quietest of all quiet neighbourhoods; it was the loveliest of spring-summer weather; and the variety of scenery on moor, in w...

The address upon the note Malcolm had to deliver took him to a house in Chelsea--one of a row of beautiful old houses fronting the Thames, with little gardens between them and t...

Mr Crathie was slowly recovering, but still very weak. He did not, after having turned the corner, get well so fast as his medical minister judged he ought, and the reason was p...

As the days passed on, and Florimel heard nothing of Lenorme, the uneasiness that came with the thought of him gradually diminished, and all the associations of opposite complex...

Florimel was offended with Malcolm: he had put her confidence in him to shame, speaking of things to which he ought not once to have even alluded. But Clementina was not only ol...

Meantime things were going rather badly at Portlossie and Scaurnose; and the factor was the devil of them. Those who had known him longest said he must be _fey_, that is _doomed...

Malcolm’s custom was, first, immediately after breakfast, to give Kelpie her airing--and a tremendous amount of air she wanted for the huge animal furnace of her frame, and the...

It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the ha...

After Malcolm’s departure, Clementina attempted to find what Florimel thought of the things her strange groom had been saying: she found only that she neither thought at all abo...

Having put Kelpie up, and fed and bedded her, Malcolm took his way to the Seaton, full of busily anxious thought. Things had taken a bad turn, and he was worse off for counsel t...

It was Sunday, during which Malcolm lay at the point of death some three stories above his sister’s room. There, in the morning, while he was at the worst, she was talking with...

Florimel and Lady Clementina Thornicroft, the same who in the park rebuked Malcolm for his treatment of Kelpie, had met several times during the spring, and had been mutually at...

It was a lovely summer evening, and the sun, going down just beyond the point of the Scaurnose, shone straight upon the Partan’s door. That it was closed in such weather had a s...

The latter part of the journey was not so pleasant: it rained. It was not cold, however, and the ladies did not mind it much. It accorded with Clementina’s mood; and as to Flori...

The door opened, and in walked a tall, gaunt, hard-featured woman, in a huge bonnet, trimmed with black ribbons, and a long black net veil, worked over with sprigs, coming down...

His plan was to watch the house until he saw some entertainment going on, then present himself as if he had but just arrived from her ladyship’s country seat. At such a time no...

In pain, wrath, and mortification, Liftore rode home. What would the men at his club say if they knew that he had been thrashed by a scoundrel of a groom for kissing his mistres...

Having caught as many fish as he wanted, Malcolm rowed to the other side of the Scaurnose. There he landed and left the dinghy in the shelter of the rocks, the fish covered with...

“There is that,” said Wallis. “I consider him much improved. But you see he’s succeeded; he’s the earl now, and Lord Liftore--and a menseful, broad-shouldered man to the boot of...

When the door opened and Florimel glided in, the painter sprang to his feet to welcome her, and she flew softly, soundless as a moth, into his arms; for the study being large an...

“She’s not sound in the temper, my lord, the groom that brought her says. He told me on no account to go near her till she got used to the sight of me.”

When he reached the yard of the mews, the uproar had nothing abated. But when he cried out to Kelpie, through it all came a whinny of appeal, instantly followed by a scream. Whe...

The next morning, Malcolm took Kelpie into the park, and gave her a good breathing. He had thought to jump the rails, and let her have her head, but he found there were too many...

The chief cause of Malcolm’s anxiety had been, and perhaps still was, Lord Liftore. In his ignorance of Mr Lenorme there might lie equal cause with him, but he knew such evil of...

Alexander Graham, the schoolmaster, was the son of a grieve, or farm-overseer, in the North of Scotland. By straining every nerve, his parents had succeeded in giving him a univ...

When Malcolm at length reached his lodging, he found there a letter from Miss Horn, containing the much desired information as to where the schoolmaster was to be found in the L...

Mr Crathie, seeing nothing more of Malcolm, believed himself at last well rid of him; but it was days before his wrath ceased to flame, and then it went on smouldering. Nothing...

“What is the meaning of this, MacPhail?” she said, when he entered the room where she sat alone. “I did not send for you. Indeed, I thought you had been dismissed with the rest...

Though unable to eat any breakfast, Malcolm persuaded himself that he felt nearly as well as usual when he went to receive his mistress’s orders. Florimel had had enough of hors...

It was late in the sweetest of summer mornings when the Partan’s boat slipped slowly back with a light wind to the harbour of Portlossie. Malcolm did not wait to land the fish,...

One Sunday evening--it must have been just while Malcolm and Blue Peter stood in the Strand listening to a voluntary that filled and overflowed an otherwise empty church--a shor...

Leaving Davy to keep the sloop, the two fishermen went on shore. Passing from the narrow precincts of the river, they found themselves at once in the roar of London city. Stunne...

It was a lovely day, but Florimel would not ride: Malcolm must go at once to Mr Lenorme; she would not go out again until she could have a choice of horses to follow her.

Things had taken a turn that was not to Malcolm’s satisfaction, and his thoughts were as busy all the way home as Kelpie would allow. He had ardently desired that his sister sho...

The next was the last day of the reading. They must finish the tale that morning, and on the following set out to return home, travelling as they had come. Clementina had not th...

When Malcolm first visited Mr Graham, the schoolmaster had already preached two or three times in the pulpit of Hope Chapel. His ministrations at the prayer-meetings had led to...

From the sands she saw him gain the turnpike road with a bound and a scramble. Crossing it he entered the park by the sea-gate; she had to enter it by the tunnel that passed und...

While they were out in the fishing-boat together, Clementina had, with less difficulty than she had anticipated, persuaded Lizzy to tell Lady Lossie her secret. It was in the ho...

When she went to her room, there was Caley taking from a portmanteau the Highland dress which had occasioned so much. A note fell, and she handed it to her mistress. Florimel op...

Notwithstanding his keenness of judgment and sobriety in action, Malcolm had yet a certain love for effect, a delight, that is, in the show of concentrated results, which, as I...

Before he again came to himself, Malcolm had a dream, which, although very confused, was in parts more vivid than any he had ever had. His surroundings in it were those in which...

For a few minutes Malcolm stood alone in the dim starlight of winter, looking out on the dusky sea, dark as his own future, into which the wind now blowing behind him would soon...

By the time he had put up Kelpie, Malcolm found that his only chance of seeing Blue Peter before he left London, lay in going direct to the wharf. On his road he reflected on wh...

When Miss Horn left him--with a farewell kindlier than her greeting--rendered yet more restless by her talk, he went back to the stable, saddled Kelpie, and took her out for an...

When Malcolm left his sister, he had a dim sense of having lapsed into Scotch, and set about buttressing and strengthening his determination to get rid of all unconscious and un...

The play was begun, and the stage was the centre of light. Thither Malcolm’s eyes were drawn the instant he entered. He was all but unaware of the multitude of faces about him,...

The door of Blue Peter’s cottage was opened by his sister. Not much at home in the summer, when she carried fish to the country, she was very little absent in the winter, and as...

Malcolm was overjoyed at the prospect of an escape to the country --and yet more to find that his mistress wanted to have him with her--more still to understand, that the journe...

When Mr Crathie heard of the outrage the people of Scaurnose had committed upon the surveyors, he vowed he would empty every house in the place at Michaelmas. His wife warned hi...

Florimel succeeded so far in reassuring her friend as to the safety if not sanity of her groom, that she made no objection to yet another reading from “St Ronan’s Well”--upon wh...

When she had finished her oats, Malcolm left her busy with her hay, for she was a huge eater, and went into the house, passing through the kitchen and ascending a spiral stone s...

“MacPhail!” it cried. “Come out with you. Don’t think to sneak there. _I_ know you. What right have you to be on the premises? Didn’t I send you about your business this morning?”