The Stronger Influence

It seemed to Sinclair that all the conditions that night favoured his suit. It was a perfect evening, warm and still, with a brilliant moon in a cloudless sky lighting the world...

That night Esme lay wakeful in the darkness with a brain too active for sleep, courting slumber, which refused to come to her aid, physically tired, yet not overtired, and menta...

During the days which followed time sped on amber wings. It sped so swiftly that her fortnight's holiday seemed to Esme the shortest fortnight her life had ever known. Oddly, sh...

Following the departure of his wife in an ambulance, Hallam made his own preparations for leaving home for an indefinite time. He purposed going into the interior. He wanted to...

As Hallam looked down on the white face, with the eyes closed, and the dark lashes resting on the colourless cheeks, there came back very vividly to his memory a picture of his...

The frankness of Esme's nature was opposed to the role of dignified silence, which she assumed deliberately out of consideration for the man who had shown so plainly his objecti...

The two or three guests at the hotel who witnessed Esme's return in the company of Hallam were filled with amazement at the unusual spectacle of the man who was never known to a...

Very vividly, like something heard long ago but never before realised, these words which Hallam had uttered on the morning she left the Zuurberg all those weary months before, e...

It seemed to Esme as they walked rapidly along in the clear light air that nature revealed herself in her fairest mood that morning. Surely never had sunlight shone more golden,...

The daylight woke Esme early. The sunbeams found their way through the open window and flashed upon her face and startled her from sleep. She had not drawn her blind overnight;...

Throughout that night Hallam tramped along the shore, struck inland, came back to the sea, retraced his steps over the same ground; walking with tireless energy while he conside...

That walk by the ineffectual light of a young moon brought about a significant change in the relations between the man and girl. The last reserves were swept away. The sweeping...

During the twenty-two unenlivening and, latterly, busy years of her life Esme Lester had never been in love, had not known the excitement which many girls of her age enjoy of po...

From dreaming of Hallam at night and thinking of him in the daytime, Esme arrived at a stage of almost incredible longing to see him again. Letters did not satisfy her. She want...

Hallam recoiled from the news of Esme's marriage as a man might recoil from the effects of a blow. The thing staggered him. His first thought was to disappear again, to walk awa...

Esme Lester lived with a married sister at Port Elizabeth in a little house in Havelock Street. Her brother-in-law was junior partner in a store which was not a particularly flo...

The receipt of those weekly letters and the pleasurable occupation of replying to them engrossed Esme's thoughts, changed all her outlook, filled her life completely. She was fa...

During the first few days after her return to her sister's home time hung dismally for Esme. It would have been better had she gone back to work immediately; but there was a ful...

The young Bainbridges were not slow in coming to a conclusion in regard to the condition of affairs between Hallam and their aunt. John pronounced Hallam as being "all right"; M...

Four years passed away. They were the years of the Great War, which flung the world into mourning and left a pall of depression like a blighting legacy on its passing.

Esme's accident, and the contemporaneous and mysterious disappearance of Hallam, brought Rose in haste and at great personal inconvenience round to Cape Town. She was terribly w...

The baby ruled the household, and tyrannised over its parents, and made slaves of its godparents, who were amazingly interested in this small cousin of theirs. Mary, a pretty gi...

Among the passengers which the train disgorged on to the little platform at Coerney, the station from which visitors to the Zuurberg proceeded on their journey up the steep moun...

These late hours, and the fact that he had taken to sleeping in the dressing-room from a desire not to disturb her, excited Esme's worst apprehensions. She fell into the habit o...

Marriage, like every other relationship in life, becomes with time a matter of usage. One by one the demands which the ardour of passion exacts relax imperceptibly, and love fin...

Esme was married from her sister's house very quietly, and with what Rose considered quite unnecessary haste. The whole affair was so sudden and so altogether unexpected that sh...

The fulness of life made perfect by a perfect human love lifted Esme so completely out of the past that all her life which had gone before seemed as a dream, a thing indistinct...

It surprised no one, and gave considerable satisfaction to her relations, when Esme, quite soon after Sinclair's return to South Africa, was married to the man who had been her...

Jim Bainbridge whistled. He filled his pipe and lighted it, and let it go out again. He repeated this performance until he had exhausted all the matches in his box; then he put...

During the morning Esme played tennis with two girls and a man who were staying at the hotel. The tennis court was rough, and a rope stretched across it did service for a net. B...

Midnight struck and still the wind raged without, while inside the house complete silence reigned. One o'clock struck. The gale was at its height; the noise of the wind was terr...

For a time Hallam kept the social world at arm's length, and continued to monopolise his wife, and to persuade himself that she needed nothing beyond his love to make life perfe...

The dining-room at the hotel was a low, narrow room, rather dark. Its French windows opened on to the stoep, which was creeper veiled and shaded with the shrubs in the garden. D...

Hallam had put her into Jim Bainbridge's swivel-chair; and he sat on a corner of the writing-table, facing her, holding one of her hands in his. It was become to him now a matte...

It had been a day of varied experiences of big moments, fraught with terror and relief, joy and sorrow, inextricably interwoven. The eventful day was followed by a night of corr...

The whole world changed for Esme with the return of the husband she had mourned as dead. But for her sorrow on George Sinclair's account, she could have found in her heart only...

The first real sorrow in Esme's life came to her with the realisation of the fact that her influence with her husband no longer sufficed to keep him steady. Gradually, so gradua...

She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life, lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, w...