The Three Black Pennys: A Novel

"I'll be damned if I do," Jasper Penny asserted. "I will marry you, you," he whispered, with his lips against the fineness of her ear. Her hands were on his shoulders; but she n...

"If you lose your temper--" Howat commenced, but Mariana impatiently interrupted him. "Why shouldn't Jim lose his temper?" she demanded. "I would. Personally, I'd be glad if he...

"The trip hammer of Myrtle Forge," he replied gravely. "I suppose it might, fancifully, be called the beating of the Penny heart; it does pound through every associated stone; a...

Ludowika sat on a small couch away from the fireplace. She smiled at Howat as he moved closer to her. She never did things with her hands, he noticed, like the women of his fami...

The hollows and stream beds were filled with the ghostly mist, and bitterly chill; the night paled slightly, diluted with grey; there was a distant clamour of crows. They entere...

"Good night," she said ungraciously, to them both, and flickered away through the dark. James Polder was savagely biting his lips; his hands, the elder saw, were clenched. "Your...

_This is a record and act of memory of you at Dower House--of June nights on the porch, with the foliage of the willow tree powdered against the stars; the white-panelled hearth...

The faint, involuntary chill again invaded Howat; suddenly an unfamiliar imagery attached to the commonplace phrase uttered by his father--the Endless Mountains! It brought back...

Howat saw, in the yellow candlelight, a woman not, he decided, any better looking than Caroline, in an extremely low cut gown of scarlet, with a rigid girdle of saffron brocade,...

"How will that affect my--my position in other ways?" she demanded, in a suddenly shrewd, suspicious tone. "Not at all," the lawyer assured her. She sobbed once, emotionally; an...

"With Graham at Shadrach. She was badly torn, and I insisted on her retreating for a week or more. There is a very capable assistant at the Academy. It's too early to speak conc...

The fact that struck him most sharply was that he was utterly without remorse for what had occurred; it had been inevitable. He experienced none of the fears against which Ludow...

Howat Penny was acutely uncomfortable, and Polder scowled at his plate. The whiskey and water shook in a tense, unsteady hand. He rose from the table with a violent relief. He p...

"I had no thought of impressing you," he said simply; "I only repeated what came into my mind, what I mean. It would be a mistake for me to take you to England, and make both of...

"We might go to the Circus," he suggested, half doubtful of the propriety of such a course. However, they went. She clung tightly to his sleeve before the illuminated, high-pill...

Later, Mariana and James Polder had gone out on the porch, he faced with reluctance the task of furnishing her with entertainment; but, to his extreme relief, she procured a lea...

A porch followed that length of the house, and doubled the end, where he stood peering into the gathering dusk. The old willow tree, inhabited by the owls, spread a delicate, bl...

Jasper Penny saw in a flash, as vivid and remorseless as a stab of lightning, that this was all true. The fatality of the past, sweeping forward in a black, strangling tide, had...

A bright, angry colour flooded her cheeks. "You are as coarse as possible," she declared. "I'm sure I wish you'd stay away altogether from Myrtle Forge; you've never been anythi...

"Really, Mariana," he protested, "at times you are a little rough. She is a very fine girl; in fact, reminds me of Scalchi. Old Byron, though, what--a regular catafalque!" A blu...

Yet the need, the longing forward, so newly come into his consciousness, persisted, grew--it had become the predominate design of his weaving. Through this he recognized a reass...

Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her complacency. Her patent satisfaction in...

He was ordinarily impervious to the influence of weather, the more depressing aspects of nature; but now he was conscious of a dejection communicated, in part at least, he felt,...

Yet it wouldn't do to expose Mariana to the terrors; and, after a sharp, inward struggle, he said almost fretfully, "Further on." She turned the pages slowly; but no one could r...