The Rising Tide

A single car-track ran through Payton Street, and over it, once in a while, a small car jogged along, drawn by two mules. Thirty years ago Payton Street had been shocked by the...

Laura Childs came into the quiet, fire-lit room like a little whirl of fresh wind. The young man, looming up behind her in the doorway, clean-shaven, square-jawed, honest-eyed,...

Somehow or other he did "put the office business through"; but the persuading of Mrs. Payton was a job of many days. So far as opinions went, he had to concede almost everything...

Mrs. Payton's mother, stroking her white gloves down over her knuckly fingers, shrugged her shoulders: "You didn't like 'those days' so very much yourself, my dear. But of cours...

The ridiculous part of Fred's dash for freedom was that she actually picked up a client or two! Of course, her commissions did not quite pay for the advertising that brought the...

"Perhaps she's not musical," Miss Eliza objected. "I hate to have a girl pounding the piano, when her talent lies in scrubbing floors." Miss Eliza Graham looked like a frayed ol...

"Oh," Fred said, shortly; "well, wait till I get out of the way, please." She stepped into the unlighted parlor, and stood there in the darkness, between the piano and the bust...

Mr. Weston, riding home in the taxi, was not without some astonishment at himself. Why was he so keenly annoyed at Fred's bad taste? Why had he such an ardent desire to kick Mai...

In those next few weeks Fred Payton was a little vague and preoccupied. The revelation which had come to her in that moment before the mirror when she had kissed her own hand, r...

"Why should he take such a long journey?" Miss Mary Graham said to Miss Eliza--"unless it is that he discovered that Miss Payton is not the sort of girl to make any man happy, a...

"I never noticed her looks," Howard Maitland was saying, as he and another member of the Survey Expedition lounged against the railing of their tubby little vessel and looked id...

Spring had sauntered very slowly up the Ohio Valley that year. During a cold and slushy April, Frederica paid her advertising bills, and was assured that the Misses Graham would...

"Nonsense!" Fred said. "If he wants to see her he'll come, and if he doesn't want to see her she'd better find it out now." But she was not entirely unsympathetic, and told Flor...

Fred was eager to impart to her man of business her wonderful discovery that visits to Payton Street should be made, not because of "duty," but because they were of value to the...

Except for the Lakeville ladies, so looked down upon by Flora, Fred had very few visitors that summer. Even Laura did not come very often, though Lakeville was only five miles f...

But it was the middle of October that saw Howard Maitland back again in town. In spite of Frederica's friendly assurance that Jack McKnight hadn't a ghost of a chance, that "que...

As things turned out, Flora might have seen her "friend" in Payton Street Friday night, had devotion prompted him to call, for the festivity at the camp was postponed for three...

The next day it rained and the little house was dark and damp. Across the sodden beach-grass Fred and Flora could see the fat woman in the next bungalow moving her trunks and he...

"What for? Besides, it's nearly five miles!" They were standing in the kitchen doorway; Zip pushed past them and went out into the mist; smelled about, stretching first his fron...

She and Howard had left the office, where the dead woman lay on the doctor's lounge, and were standing in the front hall, side by side, like two children who were being scolded....

It was extraordinary how much better Mrs. Payton was in the next few weeks. Every day she sat in the entry outside Mortimore's door, and hour after hour she and Miss Carter talk...

After Fred had gone out into the wilderness, and learned her lesson; after that long day in the cottage, when her mind had emptied itself of some of its own certainties, so that...

Often, in those weeks before Laura's wedding, Mrs. Payton, working out a puzzle, or playing Canfield on the big rosewood table in the sitting-room, would stop and stare straight...

The invitation to walk in the parade had not been given easily. Fred had forced herself to ask Laura, for very shame at the ache of resentment which neither reason, nor her old...

The whole connection seethed! The notoriety of Flora's death was nothing compared with this notoriety. The police court! The newspapers! The gossip of Mrs. Childs's Bridge Club!...

It was late in September, when she asked Arthur Weston to tell her how she could help "those awful women,"--as she called the poor creatures she had seen in jail. He had motored...

That was in September. It was the first of December when Howard Maitland came leaping up-stairs, two steps at a time, and burst into the nursery, so chock-full of news that he c...