The mother

_The Mother_[1] is an unusual book, both in its story and its setting in a remote Sardinian hill village, half civilized and superstitious. But the chief interest lies in the ps...

Seated close against the door, she clasped her hands tightly together, those work-worn hands of a servant, pressing the thumbs one upon the other to give herself courage; but ev...

Autumn and winter had passed without anything happening to confirm her suspicions, but now with the return of the spring, with the blowing of the March winds, the devil took up...

When Paul left the woman’s house and found himself out in the meadow again he too had the sensation that there was something alive, something ghostly, undefinable in the wind. I...

As a sick man is relieved to know at least the nature of his malady, so Paul would have been relieved to know at least why all these things had befallen him, and like his mother...

Paul started as though suddenly awakened from sleep and sprang up from his bed with the confused sensation of one who has to depart on a journey and is afraid of being too late....

Paul sat down at the table, which was laid ready for breakfast, and put his hat on the chair beside him, and while his mother was pouring out his coffee he asked in a calm voice:

Paul was back again in his quiet dining-room, seated at the table and waited on by his mother. Fortunately there was now something they dare talk about and the flight of King Ni...

Inside the hut the priest bent still lower, his hands clasped between his knees, his face heavy with weariness and displeasure. He too was silent now: he almost seemed to have f...

Paul was seated again at his own table in the little dining-room, lighted by an oil lamp. Behind the ridge, which looked a mountain as seen from the presbytery window, the full...

All day long Antiochus’s mother had been speculating as to what could be the object of the priest’s visit, for which her boy had prepared her, but she took good care not to betr...

Paul had gone home too, and was feeling his way upstairs in the dark: he dimly remembered going up some stairs in the dark like this when he was a boy, but he could not remember...

The world had ceased for Paul. He felt himself sinking slowly, swept down by a whirlpool through luminous depths to some dazzling iridescent place beneath the sea. Then he came...

Nevertheless he halted before his mother’s door, deeming that it would be advisable to tell her the result of his interview with Agnes and of her threat to denounce him. But he...

A few eager penitents were waiting for him, gathered round the confessional; the woman who had arrived first was already kneeling at the little grating, whilst the others waited...