The Tale of Triona

BUT for Olivia’s unquestioning faith in him he would not have pulled through this passport quagmire. At every fresh lie he dreaded lest her credulity should reach the breaking p...

THE tastes of Alexis Triona were not such as to lead him into extravagant living on the fruits of his literary success. To quality of food he was indifferent; wine he neither un...

WHEN Triona after many dim day-dreams and relapses into nothingness, at last recovered consciousness, he found himself in a narrow sort of cubicle, staring upwards at a mile awa...

OLIVIA GALE leaned back in her chair at the end of the dining-room table, and looked first at the elderly gentleman on her right, and then at the elderly gentleman on her left.

HERE, all in a rush of twenty-four hours, was a glut of incident for a young woman out for adventure. Triona had only made his effect on the romantically feminine within Olivia...

IN the course of time, Janet Philimore and her attendant father, the General, arrived at their house on The Point, and as Olivia, apprised of their advent, did not tie a white s...

OF the death of Myra Stebbings’s husband and of her second appearance in Pendish during his sojourn in the West Country, Triona knew nothing. Again she had forbidden her sister-...

But it had been a valiant fight from the moment Myra, on her return to the flat, had delivered Triona’s scribbled note, and had given her account of the brief parting interview.

FANSTEAD is a little country town built on the plan of a sparsely equipped herring bone. There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring moder...

A TAXICAB took him in dreary rain through the squalor of Tyneside, now following the dismal tram lines, now cutting through mean streets, until they reached a row of low, bow-wi...

IT was close on midnight when a car grated and stopped in front of the little Georgian house in Pendish, and the truant stumbled through the door, left open, into the presence o...

IT was only when she waited the next morning for her possible tenant, the Major Olifant of whom Mr. Trivett had spoken, and went through the familiar rooms to see that they were...

The Sister looked at the tall, lean woman, so dignified in her well-made iron grey coat and skirt and plain black hat, and was puzzled to place her socially. She might be an aus...

OLIVIA sat by her little table, dispensing tea and accepting homage with a flutter of pleasure at her heart. She had been oddly nervous—she who had entertained the stranger Olif...

SHE was waiting for him at the little South Coast station, where decorum had to cloak the rapture of their meeting. But they sat close together, hand in hand, in the hackney mot...

THIS was life; magical, undreamed of in her wildest Medlow dreams. And thanks to Lydia, she had plunged into it headlong, after a mere fortnight’s probation. There had been no d...

HE brought great news. Not only had his publishers thought well of the novel and offered him good terms, including a substantial advance, but they professed themselves able to p...

THE unhappy young man rushed through the train to the railway station, goaded by the new passion of remorse and frantic with the despair which had driven him from the accusing h...

WHAT was bound to happen had happened. Olifant the Galahad, out for grails, as Triona, and indeed as Olivia had pictured him, had lost his head, poured out a flow of mad words,...

JOHN FREKE was one of the most highly respected men in Medlow. A great leader in municipal affairs, he had twice been Mayor of the town and was Chairman of the local hospital, P...

“Yes, Poland,” said Boronowski. “Why not? You want to fight for a Great Cause. Is not a free and independent Poland the keystone of the arch of reconstructed Europe? It is a com...

THE Odyssey or the Argonautic, or whatever you like to call the epic of the first wild adventure of a young woman into the Infinite of Clothes, has yet to be written. It would n...

One morning a motor-car, having the second-hand air of a hiring garage and unoccupied save for the chauffeur, drew up before the door of a great London publishing house. The cha...

AFTER this, Olivia took up her life, as she thought, in firm hands. She had made her reparation to her old friends. She joined the family party of the Trivetts at dinner, and mi...

BLAISE OLIFANT sat over his work in the room which once, for want of a better name, the late Mr. Gale called his study; but it was a room transformed to studious use. The stuffe...

SOMEWHERE on the South Coast, screened from the vulgar by the trap of a huge watering-place, is a long, thin, sandy promontory sticking out to sea, like an innocent rib of wilde...

Myra said in her even tones: “Have _you_ everything you want for the night?” And at Olivia’s quick glance of enquiry: “You look as if you’d seen a ghost. You have. I was afraid...