The Three Sisters

But the persons in the chairs leaned back as if each withdrew as far as possible from the other. They made themselves stiff and upright as if they braced themselves, each agains...

He might have told her that he cared for her. He might have asked her if she cared. If he hadn't, it was only because there was no need to be precipitate. He felt rather than kn...

Jim turned three dogs out into the yard by way of discipline. He and Ally tried to talk to each other across the tumult that remained. Now and then Ally and the children talked...

And now, if he could have seen things as they really were, Mr. Cartaret would have perceived that he was afraid of Gwenda. As it was, he thought he was only afraid of what Gwend...

But she remembered that Gwenda had given her son his first little Sunday suit; and that, before Jimmy came, when Essy was in bed, crying with the face-ache, she had knocked at h...

It crouches there with a crook of the dale behind and before it, between half-shut doors of the west and south. Under the mystery and terror of its solitude it crouches, like a...

Ally was ill; so ill this time that even the Vicar softened to her. He led her upstairs himself and made her go to bed and stay there. He would have sent for Rowcliffe but that...

The Vicar never doubted that it was Ally that Rowcliffe wanted. For the idea of his wanting Gwenda was so unpleasant to him that he had dismissed it as preposterous; as for Mary...

And he had recovered large tracts of memory, all, apparently, but the one spot submerged in the catastrophe that had brought about his stroke. He was aware of events and of thei...

To be sure Jim's tenderness was partly penitential. Only it was Ally alone who had moved him to a perfect and unbearable contrition. For the two women whom he had loved and left...

And Steven Rowcliffe's eyes, so disastrous to the young ladies in Leeds, saw nobody in Morfe whom he could possibly want to marry. The village of Morfe is built in a square roun...

At dinner time he would pull himself together again, for, after all, he was her father. He was robust and hearty over the sirloin and the leg of mutton. He would call for a glas...

Ever since she left him, Robina had been trying to get hold of the girls, regarding them as the finest instruments in her relentless game. For it never occurred to Mr. Cartaret...

Now, the slope of the Vicarage garden followed the slope of the road in such wise that a person entering the churchyard from the high road could be seen from the windows of the...

The house door shut and she came to them. She paused in the doorway, looking at the three who stood facing her, embarrassed and expectant. She seemed to be thinking that it was...

Greatorex, conspicuous in his front seat on the platform, drew it in with great heavings of his chest. He loved that smell. It fairly intoxicated him every time. It soared singi...

Suddenly she shivered. A cold wind blew through the open window. Yet she did not move to shut it out. To have interfered with the attic window would have been a breach of compac...

Ally stood on the threshold. She had dressed herself completely in her tweed skirt, white blouse and knitted tie. Her strength had failed her only in the struggle with her hair....

"Whatever have you done your hair like that for?" said Mary on a Wednesday when Ally came down in the afternoon with her gold spread out above her ears and twisted in a shining...

For the first two miles out of Morfe the trap charged, scattering men and beasts before it and taking the curves of the road at a tangent. With the third mile the pace slackened...

But there Mr. Cartaret was wrong. He couldn't have done it or anything like it twice. It was one of those deeds, supremeful sacrificial, that strain a man's moral energies to br...

For of course she wasn't the first. The situation had repeated itself, monotonously, scores of times in his experience. It would have been a nuisance even if Alice Cartaret had...

She had both her arms stretched before him on the table now. The hands were clasped. The little thin hands implored him. Her eyes implored him. In the tense clasp and in the gaz...