The Tracy diamonds

CHAPTER PAGE I. The Prospect House 7 II. The Cause of the Battle 15 III. Uncle Zach and Craig Mason 24 IV. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton 32 V. The Tragedy 36 VI. Expected Guests 49 VII. T...

I. Fanny and Roy 228 II. Mrs. Prescott 239 III. Ancestry 246 IV. Inez 256 V. In the Yosemite 268 VI. At Prospect Cottage 275 VII. On the Road to Clark’s 290 VIII. Mark Hilton 30...

The time was a hot July morning, with the thermometer at 85 in the shade, and rising. Not a leaf was stirring, and the air seemed to quiver with the heat of midsummer. The fog,...

Mrs. Taylor’s advertisements had paid her well, bringing every summer a few guests from Boston and its suburbs, but New York had not responded, and until it did Dorothy’s ambiti...

Craig Mason was feeling tired and wondering how he was to pass the hot morning with no one to talk to and nowhere to go and nothing to see if he went there. His mother was spend...

“You see, ’twas this way, and it happened nigh on to eighty or a hundred years ago. This tarvern wasn’t built then. T’other one that was burnt stood further up the street and wa...

“I don’t know what put it into his head to think somethin’ was wrong, but he did,—Dot’s ancestor, I mean, and why the plague can’t I think of his name! I know it as well as I do...

It was fifteen minutes or more before he returned, and taking his seat, began: “Dot is so flurried and upset about them Tracys that she actually consulted me. You know they are...

On a morning in June, before our story opens, Mrs. Freeman Tracy sat in her breakfast room looking over the papers, hoping to find some advertisement for a pleasant and inexpens...

country,—the real article I mean,—with its dusty roads and horn bugs and worms and stupid people, aping last year’s fashions, but something draws me to Ridgefield, and mamma and...

The hot sun of a July afternoon was pouring in at the west windows of a little red schoolhouse among the mountains between Springfield and Albany. It was the last day of the ter...

The morning following the arrival of the Tracys was bright and beautiful as summer mornings are apt to be after a heavy rain. There was no sign of the storm which had swept so f...

Like Craig Mason, Alice was an early riser. The dewy morning in summer was to her the best part of the day. She had slept well, and before the village clock struck five she was...

Craig had been sitting on the piazza a long time waiting for somebody to come, but the somebody waited for had not appeared and he was growing rather impatient and wondering wha...

Alice found Helen in her room, seated before a mirror and waiting for Celine to arrange her hair. On the dressing table were combs and brushes and cut glass bottles and all the...

Craig had been to the post office after his mail, and taking his mother’s letters to her room, had returned to his accustomed place on the north piazza. Here he found a large gl...

Mrs. Freeman Tracy was a faded, washed-out woman who had been very pretty in her girlhood and who thought with the aid of dress and cosmetics to retain a remnant at least of her...

At precisely four o’clock Jeff drove the hotel carriage up to the door with a flourish and a feint as if it were hard to hold the horses, who looked like anything but runaways a...

Mark put her into the carriage on the seat with Alice where she wished to sit. She had accomplished her object. She had made both men dance to her music and was satisfied to tak...

Three weeks had passed of glorious summer weather, which the guests at the Prospect House had enjoyed to the full. There had been sails on the river, walks under the Liberty elm...

The north piazza, which was the widest and pleasantest around the house because the coolest and most quiet, had assumed quite a cozy, festive air since the Tracys came. Several...

Four weeks more passed much as the preceding ones had done, and it was the middle of September when as a rule city people return to their homes, and the summer hotels are closed...

The morning was long and lonely to Helen, who wondered what there was for a girl to do when all was over and settled. She felt that she ought to have been up and spoken with Cra...

It was not a feigned headache of which she complained when she went down to breakfast. Her temples were throbbing with pain and there were dark circles around her eyes.

Mrs. Tracy went into violent hysterics, which brought Celine and Mrs. Taylor and Sarah, and at last Mr. Taylor and Jeff, to her room, her sobs were so loud, amounting almost to...

Early on Monday morning Mrs. Tracy began her preparations for leaving the Prospect House. Helen’s wardrobe was to be packed as well as her own, and, although Celine did her best...

March was nearly gone when Craig Mason arrived at the Prospect House unexpectedly on the noon train, and Mrs. Taylor was greatly upset and flurried in her wish to do him honor....

Craig was entirely cured of his infatuation. Jeff’s revelations had commenced the cure, and time and his own good sense had completed it. A girl who would engage herself to him...

Mrs. Wood’s supper, prepared with so much care, was near being spoiled, it waited so long for Craig and Alice, who did not reach the house until after six o’clock. To Craig it d...

The October sun was shining brightly into the windows of a handsome drawing room in New York, where two young people were talking earnestly together. The girl was scarcely twent...

Naturally twenty-three years had changed her somewhat. The freshness and grace of youth were gone, with much of her brilliant complexion. Her dark hair was sprinkled with grey,...

It was a large dinner party assembled on Thanksgiving day to do honor to the little bride-elect, who bore herself with great dignity when the engagement was announced and congra...

Mrs. Prescott had spent the winter in Southern California, and some time in April was registered at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, with her daughter and maid. As her meals w...

The Yosemite stage which left the Milton station on the afternoon of June 15, 18—, was full of passengers, all eagerly discussing an attempt made the day before to rob the coach...

It was one of the loveliest of all the summer days in the Yosemite when Inez drove up to the hotel in a buggy which had seen a good deal of service and was not like anything Fan...

It was a good road and a pleasant road and Fanny and Inez enjoyed themselves immensely. There was a halt at Inspiration Point for the grand view and a last look at the beautiful...

When the stage disappeared from her sight Inez was standing as motionless as a statue, with a look in her eyes which made Tom half afraid to go near her.

The explanation was given concisely and fully, with nothing added or withheld. As he listened Mark felt that he had neither strength, nor muscle, nor nerve left. His sin had fou...

When Inez heard Tom’s voice and saw him standing near her she knew him at once and felt for a moment as if her heart stopped beating; then there was a sensation as if it were tu...

Mrs. Prescott had nearly recovered from the fright of the previous day, but had not felt equal to joining the party to the Big Trees. She seldom joined any party. Her room was c...

Inez, who had passed a restless night, had been told the conditions on which Fanny was permitted to come to her, and this detracted somewhat from her anticipated pleasure in hav...

Ten days passed and there was no real improvement in Inez. Occasionally she would rally and inquire about the household matters, showing that she had some interest in them, but...

Fanny’s letter had reached him in Ridgefield, where, with his father and mother, he was spending a few days at the Prospect House. Its contents electrified them all and no one m...

Inez had been better that morning and had asked to sit in her chair near the window where she could look out upon the mountains and the valley. Fanny was brushing her hair and t...

It was the morning of Fanny’s wedding day and the house in Madison Avenue was a scene of great excitement. Flowers and ferns and palms, and florists arranging them, were everywh...

Fanny and Roy had been married amid flowers and music and crowds of people and the grand event chronicled in the Boston and New York papers. That the bride’s own father was livi...

Craig and Alice were both with him and this was some comfort, while the flowers sent in great profusion made him feel, he said, as if he was somebody, and he wished Dotty knew....

Six years later and it is summer again in Ridgefield. Uncle Zach has celebrated his ninetieth birthday, and except for his lameness is nearly as hale and hearty as he was when h...