The Summons

"Thank you, Dennis," Miranda answered absently. She was standing upon the lawn at Gatwick with her face towards the line of bookmakers upon the far side of the railings. These m...

At six o'clock on the second morning after Hillyard's visit to Barcelona, the steam-yacht _Dragonfly_ swept round the point of La Dragonera and changed her course to the south-e...

Stella, the undisciplined! She had flung out of the rank and file, as long ago Sir Charles Hardiman had put it, and to this end she had come, waywardness exacting its inexorable...

"Oh, will you?" cried Stella Croyle, with a little burst of pleasure. After all, Hillyard was the great man of the evening, and that he should consider her out of all that compa...

The night express from Paris to Narbonne and the Spanish frontier was due to leave the Quai d'Orsay station at ten. But three-quarters of an hour before that time the platform w...

"You're a brick, Miranda. But I have ordered the car for you all immediately after luncheon. Joan's in bed, and wants to see no one. She seems heartbroken. She will say nothing....

"I hadn't an idea that we should find her here," said Hillyard. "Lady Splay told me so very clearly that Mrs. Croyle always timed her visits to avoid a party."

"You insisted that I should see you. You have something to say to me," said Joan. She was breathing more quickly than usual and the blood fluttered in her cheeks, but she faced...

It was the first week of September. But since his return from Rackham Park to London his days had been passed in the examination of files of documents; and what little time he h...

The restaurant of the Maison Dorée in the Plaza Cataluña at Barcelona looks across the brilliantly-lighted square from the south side. On the pavement in front of it and of its...

Goodwood in the year nineteen hundred and fourteen! There were some, throwers of stones, searchers after a new thing on which to build a reputation, who have been preaching thes...

"Oh yes. It came up to us from Cairo. Some one wanted to know where you were. They'll know about it at Cairo. We just pushed it along, you know," said the aide-de-camp. He dined...

"Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!"; and the _maître d'hôtel_ led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony. Here the table was set endwise to the balustrade, co...

The great cape thrusts its knees far out into the Mediterranean, and close down by the sea on the very point a lighthouse stands out from the green mass like a white pencil. Sou...

At six o'clock in the evening Colin Rayne, a young civilian in the Sudan Service, heard, as he sat on the balcony of the mess at Senga, the rhythmical thud of camels swinging in...

Hillyard landed in England athirst for grey skies. Could he have chosen the season of the year which should greet him, he would have named October. For the ceaseless bright blue...

Joan picked up her cloak and arranged it upon her shoulders. She did not give one thought to Stella, or even hear the words which Stella began nervously to speak. Her secret app...

It was Hillyard's creed that chance will serve a man very capably, if he is equipped to take advantage of its help; and here was an instance. The preparation had begun on the mo...

It has been said that Hillyard joined a service with its traditions to create. Indeed, it had everything to create, its rules, its methods, its whole philosophy. And it had to d...

The amazing incident which cut so sharply into these tangled lives occurred the next morning at Rackham Park. Some of the house party straggled down to a late breakfast, others...

It is curious to recollect how smoothly the surface water ran during that last week of peace. Debates there were, of course, and much argument across the table. It was recognise...

"This key was found on the lawn outside the library window this morning by Luttrell. Jenny has never referred to it since she ran downstairs this morning crying out that the key...

The library at Rackham Park was a small, oblong room, with a big window upon the garden. It opened into the hall on the one side and into the dining-room on the other, and in on...

Hillyard turned his back upon the pools of the Khor Galagu at the end of April and wandered slowly down the River Dinder. From time to time his shikari would lead his camels and...

Fairbairn fetched a couple of white porcelain developing dishes to the table. Hillyard unlocked a drawer in his bureau. They were in the deck-saloon of the _Dragonfly_, steaming...

"I have put out the blue dress with the silver underskirt, madam," said Jenny Prask, knowing well that nothing in Stella Croyle's wardrobe set off so well her dark and fragile b...

Late in the autumn of the following year a new play, written by Martin Hillyard and named "The Dark Tower," was produced at the Rubicon Theatre in Panton Street, London. It was...

Sir Charles Hardiman stood in the corridor of his steam yacht and bawled the name through a closed door. But no answer was returned from the other side of the door. He turned th...

Martin Hillyard crammed a year's enjoyment into the early hours of that night. He danced a great deal and had supper a good many times; and even the girl who had passed the seas...

Just outside Senga to the north, in open country, stands a great walled zareba, and the space enclosed is the nearest approach to the Garden of Eden which this wicked world can...

Between the North and South Downs in the east of Sussex lies a wide tract of pleasant homely country which, during certain months of those years, was subject to a strange phenom...

Rackham was a red Georgian mansion with great windows in flat rows, and lofty rooms made beautiful by the delicate tracery of the ceilings. It has neither wings nor embellishmen...