Category: Crime, Thrillers and Mystery
_The Owl_ shows its blue and gilt cover on the bookstalls every Saturday morning. Thursday nights are therefore nights of turmoil in the offices in Fleet Street. They are always wearing nights; more so, of course, in hot weather than in cold. They are nights of discomfort for...
_The Owl_ shows its blue and gilt cover on the bookstalls every Saturday morning. Thursday nights are therefore nights of turmoil in the offices in Fleet Street. They are always...
2. Chapter II.Anthony Ruthven Gethryn was something of an oddity. A man of action who dreamed while he acted; a dreamer who acted while he dreamed. The son of a hunting country gentleman of t...
3. Chapter III.The sudden telephone message from Hastings at two o’clock on that August morning and his own subsequent acceptance of the suggestion that he should be _The Owl’s_ “Special Commi...
4. Chapter IV.Once across the threshold of the dead minister’s study, Anthony experienced a change of feeling, of mental attitude. Until now he had looked at the whole business in his usual d...
5. Chapter V.He was alone. Boyd, indefatigable, had gone at once into the house, bent upon another orgy of shrewd questioning. This time his questions would have, in the light of what the st...
6. Chapter VI.“Dora was telling me,” continued Sir Arthur, “that Lucia had been feeling queer since last night. They hardly saw her after dinner. She vanished to her room and locked herself i...
7. Chapter VII.“There is a gentleman, ma’am. In the drawing-room. He says might he see you. Very important, he said it was. Please, ma’am, he wouldn’t give no name.” The girl twisted her apron...
8. Chapter VIII.Miss Margaret Warren, severely exquisite as to dress, golden hair as sleek as if she were about to begin rather than finish the day’s work, sat at her table in Hastings’s room.
9. Chapter IX.“Do not attend the inquest this morning, and above all prevent your sister from doing so. No doubt this warning is unnecessary, but I thought safer to issue it. For it is highly...
10. Chapter X.It was a few minutes after half-past four when Anthony descended to the street and re-entered his car. Through London he drove fast; clear of it, terrifically. Always, when he f...
11. Chapter XI.The great room bore an aspect widely different from that of his first visit. Down the centre ran the long trestle table of the coroner’s court. Two smaller ones were ranged alon...
12. Chapter XII.Anthony sat, running his eye over the cell. There was the chair he sat on, the truckle bed, a tinware wash-stand, a shelf, a dressing-case of Deacon’s, and, in one corner, a lar...
13. Chapter XIII.Up in his little, low-ceilinged, oak-panelled sitting-room in the Bear and Key, Anthony sat the girl in the one arm-chair. She refused whisky so pleadingly that he ordered tea....
14. Chapter XIV.Anthony said: “Get hold of private ’tec called Pellet; 4, Grogan’s Court. Find out what he knows about the ownership of _The Searchlight_, _The St. Stephen’s Gazette_, and _Vox...
15. Chapter XV.He covered the distance to the village in a time creditable for so hot a day. As he passed the Bear and Key, a knot of men stopped their conversation to eye him with thirsty int...
16. Chapter XVI.He knew the road to Marling so well by this time that he could almost have driven blindfold, and he has said that on this morning he once or twice found himself to have been sle...
17. Chapter XVII.The letter which Anthony had written in the early hours of that morning and despatched by District Messenger, the letter which had brought so important a person as Mr. Egbert Lu...
18. Chapter XVIII.Dinner that night had been a melancholy business for the sisters. During the day the anodyne of action had brought them at times almost to cheerfulness; but from the moment when...