The Sundered Streams: The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

All this clearly indicated that Gundred’s interference was urgently needed in the cause of holiness. Day by day she watched the situation, feeling more and more certain that her...

Delicately, with neatly-lifted little finger, she raised her cup and sipped. From top to toe she was the fine flower of deportment, and her manner exhaled a mild consciousness o...

Mrs. Hoope-Arkwright was a large, short woman, genial and comfortable, always anxious to give pleasure and make herself popular. Her husband had made a great deal of money some...

‘Dear Jim,’ said Gundred, ‘how happy he sounds!’ She folded up her son’s letter again, and put it deftly back into its envelope. He wrote to her once a week without fail from sc...

When Kingston Darnley woke, the clouds had broken. Overhead was the clear vault of stars; beneath, a vast flocculent sea of milky whiteness. Already the eastern air was lighteni...

Gundred, however, was too good a wife to make useless difficulties. As her husband had invited this young man, this young man must clearly be endured. After all, the visit would...

The interloper was established between Kingston and Gundred, and the purely formal nature of their marriage might have been clear even to themselves. They fell apart without wre...

Minne-Adélaïde was gone, but her work remained. A week had passed, but Gundred could never forget that dialogue. Still as far from her mind as ever was any crude distrust of her...

The new-made Darnleys, James and his sister, were triumphantly ushered into the upper world by Lady Adela, whose father’s rise, whose mother’s persistence, had won at last a rel...

To love is by no means necessarily to understand, and Kingston Darnley, as Nature and life had moulded him, was a very different character from Kingston Darnley as his mother’s...

The friendship between Kingston and Isabel did not progress apace. Its development was jerky, uneven, unsatisfactory. Kingston was at once restrained and spurred on by resentmen...

The soul passes in a moment from youth to manhood, through the iron door of a great sorrow. Between past and present stands the bolted portal, and the event of half an hour has...

Brakelond had the impassive mouldering grandeur of a great house that has outlived the troubled hours of its glory, and settled into a lethargic contemplation of its past. From...

Kingston Darnley, as usual, was late for breakfast. He had loitered pleasantly over his toilet, relieving the repellent prose of the process by frequent intervals of poetic rest...

The next morning Isabel was as late as Kingston. Gundred condoned the offence on the score of fatigue, but Kingston regarded it with that severity we always show to our own pet...

The English language, flexible and rich though it be, lacks words in which to convey the subtler social distinctions. We have had to go abroad for ‘nouveau-riche’ and ‘parvenu,’...

It was not till the three had arrived in the oaken parlour of the old chapel wing that Kingston could pause to take stock of the new-comer, and revise his first impression. Revi...

Kingston made haste to forget, as far as possible, the ominous prophecies that had descended on him, and in a rush of final activities the Season drew to an end. Gundred was beg...

Long habit had taught him to indulge in soliloquy under the mask of a dialogue with his mother. She allowed him to talk, and never interrupted the flow of his self-communings by...

For twenty years had Kingston Darnley awaited the call that was to come to him from Isabel. He had made no effort to anticipate, or even to summon, the voice that he desired. It...