The Torch Bearer

Sheila and Ted had gone to the woods with a nutting-party--a party too merry to do much but frolic, and eat as they gathered. By afternoon their baskets were not nearly full, an...

It was toward the end of April that Charlotte arrived in Shadyville. She had never lived in Shadyville since her first flight from it to boarding-school. After school had come N...

With tragic sincerity Sheila had entered into the compact for her son's life, and she kept it to the letter. She saw no reason why she should have a poorer sense of honor toward...

Peter had engaged to dine with Charlotte that night, but after his talk with Sheila, his first impulse was to excuse himself. It seemed to him impossible to get back, at once, t...

The moment when Sheila had that terrifying inward vision of her own inconsistencies marked the beginning of her self-consciousness. For a while this was acute and painful. She w...

The evening was half over when Sheila, still up-borne on the tide of her feminine exultation, glanced across the room to find that Peter stood there quietly regarding her. Strai...

Sheila was not naturally secretive, and it was a measure of the antagonism which Ted had aroused in her that she said nothing to him of her projected visit to Alice North.

Peter Burnett stood on the top-most of the broad white steps leading to the "Shadyville Seminary for Young Ladies." He had just closed the door of that sacred institution behind...

She had believed that moment of high rapture when, with Ted's face hidden against her breast, she had seemed to grasp life itself in her ardent young hands, to be but the foreru...

It is, perhaps, only after we have put many dreams and hopes behind us that we stumble upon life's real gift to us. And thus it happened for Sheila. It was as if, seeing that sh...

Peter had felt that he could not be much with Sheila henceforth; that neither his own heart nor conventional Shadyville's standards would permit it. But Sheila herself ordained...

Had Mrs. Caldwell seen Peter pacing the floor of his little hotel room that night, she would have been less certain that he did not love Sheila. She had said to him, "There's no...

One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his class-room after his duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time in shaking the dust of academic toil fr...

On her seventeenth birthday, her frocks were lowered to her slender ankles; on her eighteenth, she permanently assumed the dignity of full length skirts; on her nineteenth, she...

In that hour when Sheila, flinging herself into his arms, cried out to Ted, "Tell me again that motherhood is the greatest thing. I want to believe it!" she struck a high note t...

Sheila had thought herself acquainted with loneliness in the days immediately following her grandmother's death--days when she had had the consolation and companionship of Peter...

Mrs. Caldwell had grown very fragile that autumn; not as if she were ill, but rather as if she were gradually and gently relaxing her hold on life. As yet no one but Peter had r...

Sheila shook her head. Lila had had orders never to take Eric out of the yard without permission. She had risked the disobedience, only too sure of her mistress's absorption. Fo...