Category: Romance
IT was half-past four o’clock (by the testimony of the land-surveyor, my authority for the particulars of this story, a gentleman with the faintest curve of humour on his lips); it was half-past four o’clock on a May morning in the eighteen forties. A dense white fog hung over...
IT was half-past four o’clock (by the testimony of the land-surveyor, my authority for the particulars of this story, a gentleman with the faintest curve of humour on his lips);...
2. Chapter 2A fine-framed dark-mustachioed gentleman, in dressing-gown and slippers, was sitting there in the damp without a hat on. With one hand he was tightly grasping his forehead, the...
3. Chapter 3The day, as she had prognosticated, turned out fine; for weather-wisdom was imbibed with their milk-sops by the children of the Exe Vale. The impending meeting excited Margery,...
4. Chapter 4But whether the Baron, in naming such a distant spot for the rendezvous, was in hope she might fail him, and so relieve him after all of his undertaking, cannot be said; though...
5. Chapter 5The bewildered Margery was led by the Baron up the steps to the interior of the house, whence the sounds of music and dancing were already proceeding. The tones were strange. At...
6. Chapter 6Between six and seven o’clock in the evening of the same day a young man descended the hills into the valley of the Exe, at a point about midway between Silverthorn and the resi...
7. Chapter 7Jim thoughtfully retraced his steps. He was a village character, and he had a villager’s simplicity: that is, the simplicity which comes from the lack of a complicated experienc...
8. Chapter 8Notwithstanding a press of business, Jim went and did his duty in thanking the Baron. The latter saw him in his fishing-tackle room, an apartment littered with every appliance t...
9. Chapter 9He hastened down towards the stables, and she went on as directed. It seemed as if he must have put in the horse himself, so quickly did he reappear with the phaeton on the open...
10. Chapter 10Nothing tended to dissipate the obscurity which veiled the life of the Baron. The position he occupied in the minds of the country-folk around was one which combined the mysteri...
11. Chapter 11Margery’s face flushed up, and her neck and arms glowed in sympathy. The quickness of youthful imagination, and the assumptiveness of woman’s reason, sent her straight as an arr...
12. Chapter 12Margery could hardly repress a scream. As for flushing and blushing, she had turned hot and turned pale so many times already during the evening, that there was really now nothi...
13. Chapter 13‘I am not going anywhere just now, thank you. But I shall go to my father’s by-and-by with Edy.’ She went on with a sigh, ‘I have done what he has all along wished, that is, mar...
14. Chapter 14Margery returned home, as she had decided, and resumed her old life at Silverthorn. And seeing her father’s animosity towards Jim, she told him not a word of the marriage.
15. Chapter 15Seeing that Jim lived several miles from the widow, Margery was rather surprised, and even felt a slight sinking of the heart, when her new acquaintance appeared at her door so...
16. Chapter 16Margery duly followed up her intention by arraying herself the next morning in her loveliest guise, and keeping watch for Mr. Vine’s appearance upon the high road, feeling certa...
17. Chapter 17Now Jim was quite mistaken in supposing that by leaving the field in a roundabout manner he had deceived Dairyman Tucker as to his object. That astute old man immediately divine...