The unbidden guest

It was the voice of a pretty young girl, poised on tiptoe on the very verge of a lofty cliff, gazing down eagerly at the scene far below, the silvery Greenbrier River, the gleam...

“Oh, they are coming! I see the victoria climbing the hill!” cried Gipsy, eagerly craning her slender neck forward, her large, dark eyes sparkling with excitement, and her canin...

Laurie had closed his eyes in despair to meet inevitable death, but at that sound they flashed quickly open again, and he saw something he could never forget to his dying day.

Miss Willoughby did not have the household waiting on the steps to welcome her visitors, for they arrived in a downpour of sleet and rain, and had to be escorted indoors under t...

The storm raged on with fitful violence till late afternoon, and in the excitement of the day none of the household took note of the fact that Gipsy did not return.

The moon rose over the tops of the wooded hills, and shed its silvery light upon the weird, lonely scene until the white fog from the river obscured everything with a sheet of s...

“Oh, my dear, please do not leave the piano yet! I’ve been sitting here in the hall, enjoying your sweet songs so much!” she exclaimed eagerly. “Oh, it’s not eleven o’clock yet,...

“Something dreadful has happened to the poor girl. We found her lying in the road, like one dead, and she has never revived, though her heart beats faintly. I sent Crawford on f...

It yielded, the screws parted, the door crashed inward with such suddenness that all three tumbled in a heap upon the floor, gasping as if the breath had been knocked out of them.

She had to be placed in another room and soothed to rest, for her own apartment was temporarily converted into a prison for the enraged burglars, who were bound securely on the...

Very dearly had she paid in acute suffering for the saving of Laurie’s and Lelia’s lives, and a pallid shadow of her former lovely self she looked--poor Gipsy!--as she turned he...

It did not seem such a dreadful thing, either, to any one but Lelia, for the young girl to declare she was just dying for a ride on Saint, and wished Mr. Willoughby would come w...

He knew he would not have to look far for a rival; he had guessed at the secret admiration of the gay, handsome Warren Beihl for his betrothed. He had even seen that Lelia rathe...

Quite unconscious of the episode of the ring, and deeply grieved at Laurie’s abrupt departure, his aunt accompanied him down to the door, with many injunctions to return as soon...

“To us both, I believe. In fact, almost as soon as he came in a servant called me out on some domestic matter, and presently Laurie came hurrying after me, and we went down toge...

Every sleeper at The Crags--roused by those two loud and piercing shrieks of commingled horror, pain, and fear--sat up in their beds, or sprang wildly out upon the floor, with c...

When he came she would lose no time in making up with him, and keeping the peace hereafter, for Lelia had learned her lesson at bitter cost, and she meant to profit by it.

“Good heavens! my dear, this will never do at all, for our own fortune is dwindling away so fast it is imperative you should marry a rich man--and that soon! You must whistle La...

The crime had, no doubt, been committed for revenge by the diamond-burglars who had escaped from the prison at Lewisburg, where they were awaiting trial, Crawford said, and the...

It was dramatic, touching, this seemingly impetuous, unstudied outburst from a sore heart, in this moment of sorrow and distress. It conveyed sympathy, repentance, and love all...

He heard her passionate, protesting cry, but he did not turn back for it, only stalked on the faster to his own room to spend a sleepless night, tormented by despair at Gipsy’s...

Half-dazed by the suddenness of it all, Laurie gazed at his relative in consternation, and, seizing his hand, she dragged him passively in her wake, a silent victim, from the room.

Love and hope had such patent power for good that Lelia had an almost miraculously swift recovery from the effects of the drug she claimed to have taken in her despair at Laurie...

He did not go into raptures as a lover ought to do when his darling sets the wedding-day; he did not offer her the slightest caress, he only said in that cold, bitter voice of w...

If the aroused sleepers on the night of the tragedy at The Crags had but followed up the alarm, instead of ascribing the shrieks to nightmare dreams, the young girl might have b...

When she saw the face of the dead, wild, dark, beautiful, staring in at her through the window, all her exultation fled; her heart leaped into her throat, her face went ashen wh...

She was dead, the gentle mistress of The Crags, without ever recovering consciousness, without a parting word or look for the relatives who watched around her bed--she had alway...

The worst of it, too, was that he felt sure that he had been gulled into the marriage by a cunning scheme. She had only pretended to take the poison, but her clever acting had d...

Among the chief mourners Lelia had appeared draped in costly black, leaning on her husband’s arm, the heavy veil drawn decorously over her face that drooped against Laurie’s sho...

Her face became ashen white, a dull film glazed over the brightness of her large, blue eyes, her head sank back against her chair, her heart throbbed with a fierce resentment an...

Although his love for her was all in vain, and she could never belong to him now since Lelia had bound him with hated fetters, he could not bear to think of her as dead, all her...

A stifled moan escaped Lelia’s ashen lips and she hid her face against Laurie’s arm, her form trembling with dismay, feeling as if her sin had indeed found her out.

“Jasper Carrington, of Florida! Why, we were at school together as boys! A grand young man was Jasper. But he is dead now. I remember his sensational first marriage with the bea...

If any one had told Lelia a month ago that to-day she would be kneeling to the girl she then despised, imploring her pity and her mercy, she would have been too angry for words,...

It gave Lelia a queer feeling to think that in the day of judgment every one would hear her secret sin read out to the whole world that was so ignorant of it now.

She could not blot from her mind the memory of the hour when he had placed on her finger the beautiful ring that had so nearly cost her her life.

And cruel and unworthy as she knew Lelia to be, she wished Laurie never to find it out, never to realize that he was held in bitter bondage to one he could not help but scorn.

“The battle is won. There will be no more trouble between Laurie and his bride now. How beautiful she looked lying there with her golden hair loose upon the pillow, her white ne...

Lelia was sitting up in her bed, a beautiful vision of frenzy, her golden hair like a veil about her, her large blue eyes glaring into space, her white arms, exquisite as sculpt...

While Lelia groped in the air aimlessly for what she had lost, and Laurie held her mother’s hands in a grasp like steel, General Willoughby shook out the folds of a white robe a...

Every one knew directly that the young heiress had been lifted suddenly from poverty and obscurity to wealth and position. They declared that she must have deserved it, she was...

When Lelia recovered from her strange, somnambulistic trance, and learned from her mother all that had happened in that fateful night, she was like a mad thing for a while.

“She has dragged my proud name through the mire of a divorce-court and the columns of yellow journals to advertise her clap-trap play! It is like her--vain, selfish, sensational...

“Then hear me, sweet! I had the same wish then that I have now. I had in my mind the same story that nightingale is warbling to the flowers; the old, old story of love. I wished...