The Turnstile

At the first glance it looked as if the midnight chimes of a clock in an old city of the Midlands might most fitly ring in this history. But we live in a very small island, and...

The experiences of James Challoner on that day of ruin at Valparaiso were various, but none of them were pleasant. It was his twenty-eighth birthday and up to two o'clock in the...

There were two more shocks that night, the first at five minutes past one, the second half an hour before sunrise. James Challoner sat in the centre of the most open space he co...

Cynthia woke on the eighth of January to the knowledge that a thrilling day for her had just begun. She looked out beneath the sun blinds across the Daventry estancia. Not a han...

The great reaping-machine came swaying over the uneven ground toward her, along the edge of those glistening acres. A huge arm of iron rose and fell, catching up the swathes of...

"'Molested' is too strong a word," she said hastily. She now meant to make as light of the encounter as she possibly could. "It was very likely my fault. I got out of the trap a...

Within the room the three people were standing, the reaper upon one side of the table, Joan and Robert Daventry close together upon the other. The reaper was still laughing.

But though the light burned in her room, Cynthia did not sleep till daybreak. For the first few hours there was a strange bustle about the passages of the house, for which she d...

Thus the greater part of three years passed, but toward the end of the third the influenza became virulent throughout that country. It was a winter of sharp frosts and sudden th...

"I can quite understand," he returned with a pleasant pomposity, "that to a sailor who has been three years in the Antarctic the deficiency is a very lamentable business. But th...

A week later, and much about the same hour, Captain Rames was driven along the Mall in St. James's Park. Friday had come round again, and the light did not burn in the clock-tow...

The threatened dissolution was, after all, postponed, and through the autumn months Captain Rames went busily up and down between London and Ludsey. He made his head-quarters at...

The walls of the great Corn Exchange were draped with banners and hung with gigantic mottoes. Cynthia sat in the front row of chairs upon the platform with Isaac Benoliel upon o...

It had been arranged that Mr. Benoliel's small party should take supper with Harry Rames at his hotel. As they stood waiting at the foot of the platform the agent came to them f...

St. Anne's Hall stands tucked away in a narrow street of Ludsey by the spacious square; and from its ancient windows you look out between the lozenges of stained glass upon the...

The next two hours were for Rames of the tissue whence nightmares are woven. Rames was conscious that he made speeches and still more speeches and yet others on the top of those...

Three months had passed since the Ludsey election. The air was warm and golden and already the world whispered of summer, yet not too loud lest it should seem to boast and so be...

Yet to her astonishment Harry Rames came that very week on the Friday afternoon. Cynthia received him with an elaborate dignity. There was no acidity in her welcome, neither was...

"It is the truth," he insisted. "I almost did more than come to you. I almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it in the House."

The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to come to her, and when he came she told h...

"I daren't be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises--some would say three great catastrophes--birth, marriage, and death. The first and the last happen. They are ou...

"Well, here's the truth. I am a Barbary Jew. I come out of Morocco, the one country where you'll find the East to-day. Already in Tangier, the city given over to the foreigner,...

On the morning after Parliament had risen the newspapers announced the marriage of Cynthia Daventry to Harry Rames. The ceremony had taken place by special license early one mor...

Harry Rames and Cynthia passed the autumn at the white house, and hardly a day passed but one or the other was seen in the climbing streets of Ludsey. Harry presided at the soci...

"We will have to make a great stand next year, Rames," said Robert Brook. "We must organize. We have time, thank goodness. There are ten of us now. A lot more will join us."

Bramling is the very house for a conspiracy. It lies in Dorsetshire, hidden away at the back of the grass-walled town of Wareham on the road to no where. A stream runs past its...

Captain Rames had arranged to travel by a train which ran directly into Warwickshire through the outskirts of London. It left Wareham at mid-day, some two hours later than the f...

"Aren't there discoveries to be made, maps to be drawn of that continent and something to be learned from the soundings?" asked Cynthia, recollecting Harry Rames's own book upon...

An hour later Cynthia drove down to the House of Commons, anxious and yet expectant of triumph. For on this afternoon Harry Rames should particularly excel; the occasion was so...

Cynthia ran down the broad flight of steps into Westminster Hall, and skimmed across the historic flags of the ancient building without a pause. What at this moment was Charles...

Visitors who would not give their names but claimed to be citizens of Ludsey were not infrequent while Parliament was in session. They usually came with the same request--the lo...

Cynthia went that night alone to a dinner party in Seamore Place. But she was ill at ease and as soon as she could get away she hurried home. She had not seen her husband that d...

The session passed, and Devenish's land bill, as Rames had foretold, was postponed. It figured again in the Address at the beginning of the following year, but as late as March...

A long account of Hemming's expedition, sent by a New Zealand correspondent, appeared in one of the morning papers the next day. Hemming had travelled a couple of hundred miles...

Yet that August when Parliament had risen, Harry Rames and Cynthia were cruising in the Solent and no word had been spoken by her to remedy their trouble. It was Cynthia who had...

But there ran through the piece she chose a melody of a haunting wistfulness and Harry Rames, happening to glance at his wife in the darkness of the auditorium, saw that the tea...

At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides...