The taming of Nan

The voice of Nan Cherry, shrill and aggressive, sounded its war alarm on the quiet, dawn-glimmering street. Whereupon a crowd of sparrows, busy picking up from before that door...

The hour the porter had set as the one beyond towards Narrowfields and Cherrydale--places which Polly must not transgress, was creeping so near, yet far from each other. Narrowf...

Peter’s watch had stopped and when he had struck a match to look at it he had not noticed that it was stopped. Polly was later home than ever she had been. She had come along da...

It was Aunt Miriam, daughter to Obadiah Cherry, the porter’s deceased godfather, who suggested, organised and stage-managed the gathering of the Cherry clan to welcome the broke...

Three weeks of utter dependence, of rising late to do nothing where he had used to rise early to take part in a world of action, of sitting jammed between a wash-boiler and a dr...

Nan did not come too near Cherry’s chair during the next day. Her attitude was like that Rag had once shown, on being cuffed for eating a chicken. In Nan’s case, however, it was...

Blackbird flutes busy in the silver coldness of mornings that come “at seven”; larks rising from grey fields sparkling under the sunrise with a million beads of dew--larks risin...

Granny stared, looking startled for a moment. The idea of Cherry descending to the task of peeling potatoes gave her a shock similar to that a good Royalist might feel on viewin...

Polly went back to Narrowfields in high spirits. Had she not left behind her a challenge in that scented glove? She had likewise left a copy of “Whisper, and I shall Hear,” on t...

Cherry’s mother had not crossed the threshold of her son’s house since that unfortunate day when she had ventured over it on hearing that little Ted, the fifth infant that had p...

The great struggle between Nan and Cherry began so soon as everything in the new house was in apple-pie order. It began, in fact, immediately the bustle ended, and the hole Nan...

In the year that followed, nothing particular happened. The great change in the Cherry household was that things ceased to happen--though there were severe inward struggles of w...

At the turn o’ the year, Bob Wild made fewer confessions to the girl he had made into his adviser and the sharer of his great romance. Something in Susan herself may have accoun...

Seven moons, one after another, peeped through Cherrydale’s trees that broke the bareness of the land about. It was going to be a white Yule; such as Christmas cards are made fr...

When Peter arrived at the Cherry castle twice in one week, Cherry realised that something must be done. Peter was so obviously a young man in a hurry. Worse than that, he was al...

Cherry sat in his ingle-nook during the weeks that followed, watching the drama of Nan fighting death. His own part was necessarily that of an onlooker. Sometimes he stretched h...

Cherry engaged the room in which Polly’s wedding was to be “held up” a month before the time. The only thing in its favour against the homeliness of Granny’s cottage was--it wou...