The Prelude to Adventure

Half an hour later he was in his room again, and the real world had come back to him. It had come back with the surprise of some supernatural mechanism; it was as though the sof...

That attempt to make Craven speak his mind was Olva's last plunge into the open. He saw now, with a clarity that was like the sudden lifting of some blind before a lighted windo...

The next day the frost broke, and after a practice game on the Saul's ground, in preparation for a rugby match at the end of the week, Olva, bathed and feeling physically a fine...

On the next evening the sun set with great splendour. The frost had come and hardened the snow and all day the sky bad been a pale frozen blue, only on the horizon fading into c...

It is essential to the maintenance of the Cambridge spirit that there should be no melodrama. Into that placid and speculative air real life tumbles with a resounding shock and...

He was running--running for his life. Behind stretched the long white road rising like a great bloated, warning finger out of the misty trees. Heavy cushions of grey cloud blotc...

As he looked around his room he knew that he was leaving it for ever. What ever might be the issue of his conversation with Rupert, he knew that that at any rate was true; he wo...

And after all he slept, slept dreamlessly. He woke to the comfortable accustomed voices of Mrs. Ridge, his bedmaker, and Miss Annett, her assistant. It was a cold frosty morning...

He went into Hall. He sat amongst the particular group of his own year who were considered the _elite_. There was Cardillac there, brilliant, flashing Cardillac. There was Bobby...

Carfax was buried. There had been an inquest; certain tramps and wanderers had been arrested, examined and dismissed. No discovery had been made, and a verdict of Wilful "Wilful...

"There _is_ a God after all." That was the immense conviction that faced him as he heard, slowly, softly, the leaves, the twigs, settle themselves after that first horrid crash...

Afterwards, lying in his easy chair before his fire, he was allowed a brief and beautiful respite. It was almost as though he were already dead--as though, consciously, he might...

It was all, when one looked back upon it, the rankest melodrama. The darkness, the flaming lamp, Craven's voice and eyes, Bunning . . . it had all arranged itself as though it b...

That evening Olva was elected President of the Wolves. It was a ceremony conducted with closed doors and much drinking of wine, by a committee of four and the last reigning Pres...

That night the cold fell, like a plague, upon the town. It came, sweeping across the long low flats, crisping the dark canals with white frosted ice, stiffening the thin reeds a...

And now there was no longer any doubt. He faced it with the most matter-of-fact self-possession of which he was capable. Some-thing was waiting for his surrender. He figured it,...

One gentleman, timid of voice, uncertain in wit, easily dismayed by the derisive laughter of the opposite party, asserted that "This House considers the Naval policy of the pres...