The trumpet in the dust

Mrs. Clapham got up on that fine September morning like some king of the East going forth to Bethlehem. She awoke with a heady sense of excitement and power, not wearily, and wi...

She re-acted a little after the episode of the telegraph-boy, who had seemed to be bringing her happiness to her, and after all wasn’t. That moment of mounting excitement had le...

Out in the clear September sunshine she planted herself well beyond the doorstep and a yard or two down the road, feet apart, hands on her hips, and her calm but interested gaze...

It was hardly surprising that Emma’s approach should have caused panic in the little group, for it was only on the rarest occasions that Emma ever approached anybody. As for mak...

By the time the Chorus had talked itself to rags and a dribbling finish, and Mrs. James had remembered her pudding and Mrs. Airey her hot irons; and Mrs. Clapham had had time to...

The rocking had begun again, the slow, rhythmic rocking that seemed to draw the past out like a charm, in spite of the continuous protest of the angry chair. It altered in chara...

The hill, rising beside the window, seemed to surge along its sill as a rising wave surges along the bows of a vessel, and she had to bend almost double to see through the dirty...

The whole world had seemed bright with the fine September day which had been sent to bless Mrs. Clapham, but there was no September day in Emma Catterall’s. Most houses take on...

She drew great breaths of relief as she made her way through the fields, treading the little worn paths between the sloping stretches of green. Between the warm fastnesses of th...

There was no young soldier to tug her through the last stile, but she would have got the better of it even if she had had to climb it, for on the far side lay the long, white hi...

She drew in a long breath as she slowly opened the door, feeling for that which was waiting for her on the other side. Then slowly she let it out again with a sense of blissful...

The first excitement of recognition and discovery being now over, she was able to turn her mind to plans for the future. She had paid her debt to the dead in those few moments o...

It was the same cottage, and yet not the same; her old home, and yet a place that she hardly knew; but indeed for the first few moments she scarcely so much as saw it. All that...

For a long moment she stared at her without change of expression, her brain insisting, as it had done of the cottage, that it did not know her. She belonged to her own section o...

Mrs. Tanner had to turn her back on the sword before she could finally believe her eyes. It was true, of course, that voices had reached her while she was upstairs, warning her...

And still it was not much more than half-past six.... Mrs. Clapham, lifting her lids at last with the effort of one to whom every inch of her body is insisting that the business...