The Story of Duciehurst: A Tale of the Mississippi

The aspect of the Duciehurst mansion gave no token of its ruinous condition when first it broke upon the view. Its stately portico, the massive Corinthian columns reaching to th...

Day was breaking. The luster of the moon had failed. Gaunt and grisly the old ruin began to increase in visibility. The full, gray, prosaic light emphasized details, whether of...

Paula looked down through the broken roof of the portico supported by the massive Corinthian columns. A group of men stood on the stone floor below, men of slouching, ill-favore...

Dead low water and there the steamboat lay on the sand-bar, stranded and helpless. The surging swirls of the swift current raced impetuously on either side. Scarcely a furlong d...

Adrian Ducie was affronted beyond measure by the unseemly notoriety given to his part in the Floyd-Rosney incident, in the subsequent publications emanating from various sources...

In all riparian estimation the grotesque plight of a craft stranded is more or less a catastrophe. Even in this sequestered nook spectators were not slow to mark, at a distance,...

That night Colonel Kenwynton had a strange dream. He had come to the time of life when he had no appreciable future. His possibilities were limited to the renewal of his promiss...

In his inexorable view of the sanctity of his promise Colonel Kenwynton had no impulse to confide the details of the revelation he had received or to take counsel thereon. Still...

A diminution in the floods of rain began to be perceptible, and the extreme violence of the wind was abated. Now and then a gust in paroxysmal fury came screaming down the river...

The weather had been vaguely misting all the dreary morning. Through a medium not rain, yet scarcely of the tenuity of vapor, Paula had gazed at the tawny flow of the swift rive...

Certainly no institution of its type ever had such cheerful inmates as the Glenrose Sanatorium could boast so long as Colonel Kenwynton and the blind Major sojourned within its...

The season had opened in a whirl of social absorption for Paula, once more established in their city house for the winter. She had never known her husband so interested in these...

The effect on Floyd-Rosney of his wife’s legal proceedings was deep and radical. His counsel constantly noted in him a sort of stunned surprise, as if contemplating some fantast...

As the months wore on into winter Randal Ducie, in the pursuance of the effort to rehabilitate his broken and maimed life, was often in Memphis. His old associates had an eager...

Edward Floyd-Rosney in some sort habitually confused cause and effect. In his normal entourage he mistook the swift potencies of his wealth, waiting on his will, like a conjurer...

If the patience, the concentration, the tireless endurance with which Jasper Binnhart awaited the return of the stranger, could have been applied to any object of worthy endeavo...

Paula reached her destination early the next morning. She had not slept during the night and as soon as the light began to dawn she raised the blind at her window and lay in her...

If Floyd-Rosney’s temper were less imperious, if he had had less confidence in the dictates of his will, which he misconstrued as his matured judgment, he could not have so sign...

As his antagonist fell heavily to the floor, the force of the impact shaking the crazy, ruinous superstructure of the boat with a sinister menace, Floyd-Rosney’s first emotion w...

Hildegarde passed a wakeful night of troubled thought. Only after the tardy dawn of the early spring was in the room did she fall into the dull slumber of exhaustion, from which...

The auspicious announcement came first from the balcony. Then the cry “A boat! A boat!” was taken up by the group on the portico, and echoed by those within, pouring out in eage...

Adrian Ducie looked in startled amazement down into her white, drawn face with its hollow, appealing eyes, and quivering lips that could not enunciate a word. He did not recogni...

The vehicle was out of sight in a moment. He thrust his cap on the back of his head, sunk his hands deep in his pockets and strode up the flight of steps to the broad stone-floo...

Floyd-Rosney had expected that the restoration of the child to the mother would effect an immediate reconciliation with his wife. Therefore, he attained a serenity, a renewal of...

One evening, late in the summer, the melancholy recluse, who might have forgotten, so seldom did he speak, the sound of his own voice, strolled out to evade the intensity of the...

Floyd-Rosney could scarcely restrain his fury when the papers were served upon him. The whole subject had grown doubly distasteful because of its singular connection with his do...

Colonel Kenwynton, now at his home on his plantation on the bayou, also gazed with starting eyes and dumfounded amazement at the excerpt from the legal proceedings, within his o...

It was through no will of her own that Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had remained at Duciehurst. She had been eager and instant in the preparations for departure as soon as the approach of...