The Master of Man: The Story of a Sin

_Also I wish to say that Tolstoy told me, through his daughter, that similar incidents occurring in Russia (although he altered them materially) had suggested the theme of his g...

We were in full school after breakfast, when the Principal came from his private room with his high, quick, birdlike step and almost leapt up to his desk to speak to us. He was...

Deemster Stowell was the only surviving member of an old Manx family. They had lived for years beyond memory at Ballamoar (the Great Place) an estate of nearly a thousand acres...

Next day the Deemster drove to Douglas to meet his son coming back. The weather was cold, he had to leave home in the grey of morning, and he was driving in an open dog-cart, bu...

The winter passed, the spring came and nothing was done for Victor. His father made no effort to provide for his future, whether at another school, at college, or in a profession.

Fenella Stanley had not awakened early, as Janet had supposed--she had never been to sleep. Her bedroom had been to the north-east, and she, too, had seen the moonlight creep ac...

Victor Stowell spent his first two hours after Janet left him in destroying everything which might remind him of Fenella. Her picture, which Janet had framed and hung over his m...

Fenella Stanley had been two and a half years at the head of the Women's Settlement. Her work as Lady Warden had been successful. It had been a great, human, palpitating experie...

It was the first Saturday in August, when the throbbing and thunging of the vast machinery of the mills and factories of the English industrial counties comes to a temporary sto...

Dan Baldromma's meeting in the market-place had not been the success he had expected. Standing on the steps of the town lamp, between the Saddle Inn and the Ship Store, he had d...

He could not help seeing it--Bessie was not as pretty as he had thought. There was something common about her beauty when she was asleep which had been effaced by her eyes while...

Within an hour he settled Bessie Collister temporarily with Mrs. Quayle. He told her they were to be married ultimately, but meantime (that she might feel more comfortable in he...

The Deemster had not intended to sit at the next Court of General Gaol Delivery, and had already arranged for the second Deemster to take his place, but when, next morning at br...

"You look ill, my boy, and no wonder," he said. "Fenella and I are to take a short cruise in the yacht before the autumn ends. You must come along with us."

"Ah, here you are at last! Just in time! A breeze sprang up an hour ago, and the Captain would have gone without you but for me. The herring fleet have gone already. Look, there...

When Stowell awoke next morning at Ballamoar a flock of sheep, liberated from a barn, were bleating before a barking dog. He had passed a restless night. All his soul revolted a...

Earlier in the afternoon Dan Baldromma, while running his hands through the ground flour in the mill, with the wheel throbbing and the stones groaning about him, had been struck...

From the first Victor Stowell had disappointed her. To live in the dark--hidden away, unrecognised, suppressed--it had not been according to her expectations. Her pride, too, ha...

"I dined with the Home Secretary the following night, and the Lord Chief Justice, who was among the guests, was warm in his approval. Acid old fellow with noisy false teeth, but...

When she read in the insular newspaper the long report of the trial of the Peel fisherman she was terrified. Men did not forgive their wives, then, in such cases? On the contrar...

The old Court-house at Castle Rushen was full to overflowing. Nearly all the great people of the island were there--the Legislative Council, the Keys, the leaders of the Bar, th...

Bessie had passed a miserable night. Having been awake until after five in the morning she was asleep at nine when somebody knocked at her bedroom door. It was old Miss Ethel wi...

Two hours had passed. Bessie was in her bedroom--the little one-eyed chamber (entered from the first landing on the stairs) in which she had dressed for Douglas. But the sheet o...

Victor Stowell had been more than a week in London. Fortune had favoured him from the first. The Home Secretary (a tall, spare, elderly man, with a clean-shaven face of rather s...

For ten days Alick Gell had been searching for Bessie Collister. When he first read her letter on reaching Derby Haven (he read it a hundred times afterwards) he remembered some...

It was the morning of the day of the swearing-in of the new Deemster at Castle Rushen. The Bishop had asked permission to solemnise the ceremony with a religious service--a cust...

Next day the insular newspapers announced that the new Deemster, on his return home from Castletown, after the ceremony of his swearing-in, had had a sudden seizure. A heavy fal...

"Helloa! Glad to see you about again. Fenella has gone off to the south of the island somewhere, but she'll be home for luncheon. Take a cigar? No? Not smoking yet? I must anyway."

For a good hour before the arrival of the Deemster, Castle Rushen had been full of activity. In the Court-house itself, warm with sunshine from the lantern light, Robbie Stephen...

"The brutes! They're only trying to catch me out that they may kill me. Why don't they do it then? Why don't they finish me? This waiting is the worst."

Stowell saw him to the door, and held it open with his shoulder against the wind, which swirled through the hall, making the flame of the lamp on the landing to flame up in its...

In accordance with the suggestion of his Excellency, the accused had been seen during the adjournment (though not by him), with the result that she had confessed to having given...

"As for you, what have you to reproach yourself with? So far as this case is concerned you have done nothing that is wrong or irregular. The girl was guilty. You gave her a fair...

The words beat on Stowell's brain with the paralysing effect of a muffled drum. He was driving up the mountain road. Char-à-bancs, full of English visitors (who were laughing an...

Meanwhile Fenella had been going through her own temptation. On the night after the trial, having bathed her swollen eyes, she went down to dinner. Her father looked searchingly...

When Stowell reached Government House he found the Governor in the garden, bareheaded and smoking a cigar of which he was obviously trying to preserve the ash, while he watched...

When he left Government House in the heat and flame of his anger he was at war with God and man. There was a kind of self-defence in thinking that, however deep his own wrong-do...

For four days everything had fed his fury. Having no housekeeper he took his meals in a neighbouring hotel which was frequented by his younger fellow-advocates. Sitting alone in...

In the morning Stowell went to church. In the afternoon he sat in the Library, reading in many volumes the stories of prison-breakings and escapes. He saw that in nearly every c...

Nearly three hours later Stowell was at the Point of Ayre, where the head of the island looks into the sea. Leaving his car at the end of the last paved road he walked over the...

Awakening in the "George" in the early hours of morning, Fenella heard a noise outside her window that was like the running of a shallow river over a bed of small stones. She kn...

At four o'clock that day the Attorney-General and the Chief Constable had returned to Government House and were sitting, on either side of the Governor, with the jailer standing...

Stowell awoke on the second day after the escape putting his situation to himself so. Where was the harm if Gell was suspected? He had gone with the woman he loved. He was happy...

"Mob reason, and you know what that is, your Honour. They say justice in the island is corrupt. If you are rich you get whatever you want. If you are poor you get nothing. A gui...

Stowell found it difficult to recover consciousness. He was lying on the sofa, and he looked around. There was the armchair--it was empty. But the lamp on the bureau was still b...

Three times during breakfast that morning Fenella had seen somebody coming up the drive. The first to come was the Major from Castletown, riding at a fast trot. On being shown i...

There had been wild doings in Douglas since the Chief Constable's visit to Government House. Stones had been thrown and windows broken. At length the Mayor, not without personal...

For a long half-hour before the proceedings began the courthouse was dark with men. Indignation against Stowell had succeeded to astonishment. Piecing things together (from Fene...

The island had begun to recover from its fit of moral intoxication. Sympathy was swinging round to Stowell. The pathos of his stupendous downfall had taken hold of the people. T...