The mystery road

Myrtile stood upon the crazy verandah, her eyes shaded by her hand, gazing down the straight, narrow footpath, a sundering line across the freshly ploughed field, which led to t...

The two young men adopted characteristic attitudes when confronted with the slight misadventure of a burst tyre and a delay of half an hour. Christopher Bent deliberately filled...

“I am never surprised at anything that Gerald does,” she told Christopher, who was seated next her at the dinner table, “but I must say that I should never have expected you to...

Myrtile came flying to the door. Christopher saw her eyes travel over his shoulder, he saw the sudden cloud upon her face. A queer little stab of pain startled him by its very p...

It is a fact that when the two young men reëntered the establishment of Madame Lénore, they both failed utterly to recognise the girl who was standing in a distant corner, talki...

The two women sat on the terrace of their wistaria-covered villa,--Madame de Ponière hunched up in her chair, smoking a cigarette through a long tube; Pauline, her reputed niece...

Gerald, although he was in reality brimful of confidence in all his relations with the other sex, had sometimes a not altogether unattractive appearance of shyness. He stood bar...

Myrtile was suddenly tired. She seated herself upon the trunk of a tree, and Christopher followed her example. Below them stretched the motley panorama of Monte Carlo, the wide...

Gerald and Christopher were a little disappointed with their rendezvous, so far as regards its possibilities for intimate conversation. Although it was twenty minutes to nine wh...

During their short walk to the Sporting Club, where the two young men had arranged to spend the rest of the evening, Christopher endeavoured to bring the conversation round to t...

Myrtile rose in the morning, as was her custom, at a little after seven o’clock, carefully made her bed, dressed, and walked for an hour upon the Terrace. These early diurnal wa...

Myrtile was seated alone at the far end of the Terrace, outside the Hôtel de Paris, when the tragedy happened. Her first impression was that some very unusual people had found t...

Gerald found Pauline waiting for him at the accustomed spot, after luncheon that afternoon. As he slowed down his car to pick her up, he was conscious of a return of that feelin...

Madame de Ponière dismissed the servants with a little wave of the hand and looked thoughtfully for a few moments into the fire of pine logs which had been kindled in the grate....

It was after dinner at the Villa Acacia, and Lady Mary and Christopher, hardiest of the little gathering, were strolling back and forth on the terrace in the violet darkness. Ar...

Christopher and Gerald were taking an early morning stroll and displaying an almost feminine partiality for the shop windows, when the former suddenly felt his friend’s hand tig...

Gerald was absolutely amazed as he led Myrtile back to their seat in the palm court of the hotel. They had lunched, wandered about the town, and afterwards made their way back t...

Once more Christopher and Lady Mary braved the night air on the terrace of the Villa Acacia. The latter pointed across the gorge to the villa on the other side, a shadowy-lookin...

“I have come to your party,” Myrtile announced, “and even Monsieur Christopher shall not send me away. I went to Madame Lénore. She dressed me and she had my hair arranged. It w...

Gerald had been lunching at the Hyde Park Hotel and was on his way to pay a call in Curzon Street. Hence his progress through the sun-baked and dusty park at three o’clock on a...

Pauline leaned back in her chair with a little murmur of content. Through the drooping branches of the great plane tree was a fascinating little vista of scarlet-clad orchestra,...

“I would have preferred hearing that you had been on the moors,” his father observed, with a glance at his son’s pallid face and careworn expression. “London in August always se...

The world seemed a very good place to Lady Mary as, from the depths of her chair under the cedar tree on the following afternoon, she watched Christopher, conducted as far as th...

“Well, thank heavens you haven’t forgotten how to hold your gun straight!” Lord Hinterleys remarked, a few days later, laying his hand affectionately upon his son’s shoulder. “I...

The change in Pauline’s manner, when Gerald was ushered by an untidy-looking waiter into her sitting room on the following afternoon, was almost electrifying. In place of her us...

Christopher was warmly welcomed at Hinterleys when he made his promised appearance there, about a fortnight after Gerald’s departure. He would have preferred postponing his visi...

Gerald, worn out with long and comfortless travel, pulled the long, iron bell outside the closed door of Elsa Francks’ house in Sokar, with a sense of relief that the first part...

The Governor was a large, corpulent, untidy-looking man in an ill-fitting uniform, with coarse features and a straggling beard. He clicked his heels together and made some prete...

Gerald, after a weary climb out of the town, stood at last, at the appointed hour on the following morning, before the rusty iron gates of the fortress. Untidy and neglected tho...

The telegram was brought in to Lady Mary as she sat alone in her little sitting room, in the hours between tea and the dressing bell,--hours which, so far as possible, especiall...

“A woman, your ladyship. She struck me as being some sort of a foreigner. She assured me that her business was urgent. I have shown her into the morning room.”

Christopher had taken his seat--had already, indeed, made his maiden speech--when Gerald left the nursing home into which he had been moved from the hospital. The doctors, howev...

Gerald, after all, derived small satisfaction from his visit on the following day. He found his destination easily,--a small, detached house in a retired back street, with a bel...

After they had left Toulon, the two men seemed almost to change places. Gerald, who for the last four days had been in much the same mentally comatose state as he had been since...

The two young people came down the cypress grove, arm in arm. Gerald was walking with much of his old swagger. Once more his head was thrown back; once more there was all the jo...