The Wharf by the Docks: A Novel

Everybody knows Canterbury, with its Old-World charms and its ostentatious air of being content to be rather behind the times, of looking down upon the hurrying Americans who da...

"Come, come; cheer up, my dear," he said. "If he loves you honestly, and I don't know how he can fail to do so, a few words with your father will put matters all right. There is...

For a moment the two men stood staring at each other without uttering a word. It seemed to Max that his friend did not recognize him; that he looked like a hunted man brought to...

Max did not stay long with his friend, but made the excuse that he was half asleep, after a few minutes' rather desultory conversation, to go back to his hotel.

And Doreen, with one watchful eye on Dudley all the time, made a lane through her boxes and her hampers to admit the passage of her father to a chair.

Queenie kept Dudley's half-confessed secret to herself for the whole of that day. She was hoping against hope that he would change his mind again and speak to Doreen himself. Si...

There was an awful silence. Max was so deeply impressed by the girl's words, her looks, her manner, by the gloom of the cold, dark passage, by the desolate appearance of the two...

"By Jove!" muttered Max. Then, with a sudden outburst of energy, inspired by indignation at the trap in which he found himself, he dashed across the floor to the zinc pail he ha...

Max had become accustomed, in the course of this adventurous visit, to surprises and alarms. Every step in the enterprise he had undertaken had brought a fresh excitement, a fre...

There was some constraint upon them both at first; and Max had had time to feel a momentary regret that he had been foolish enough to stay, when he was surprised to find the gir...

Max tried to find the door by which he had been thrown into the room. The upper portion was of glass, he supposed, remembering the red curtain which hung on the other side of it...

And he saw through a raised trap-door in the flooring above the shrewish face of old Mrs. Higgs, and the very same candle in the very same tin candlestick that he had seen in us...

It was on the evening after that of his expedition to Limehouse that Max Wedmore found himself back again at the modest iron gate of the park at The Beeches. He had not sent wor...

Mr. Wedmore repeated his comment: "Curious, isn't it?" before Max could reply. At last he nodded, and handed back the paper to his father. Then he turned his chair toward the fi...

Even if Max had not had such an ugly experience of the ways of Mrs. Higgs, even if this meeting with her in the barn had been his first, his sensations would hardly have been ag...

Christmas was over, and The Beeches had subsided into its normal state of prosperous tranquility. Max had had a fresh situation discovered for him, and he was now wasting his ti...

Dudley, who had either forgotten the presence of Max or was past caring how much his friend learned, since he already knew so much, walked up and down between the fireplace and...

"I hope he'll give us the full ten minutes," said he, "for I had no luncheon to-day, and when I'm hungry I always get very cross. Is that your experience?"

On the contrary, he was delighted to have the opportunity of slipping quietly away, and of evading the solicitude of his friend, as well as the society of Carrie herself, of who...

Great as the shock was of finding himself flung suddenly into what he supposed was a flooded cellar, Dudley did not at first believe that the old woman had any worse intention t...

The night was clammy and cold. The fog was growing thicker, blacker. And the water of the Thames, as Max plunged his hand into it, struggling to raise the body of his friend, wa...

"Thought you'd be pleased, sir," said he, as he helped to get Dudley into the carriage. "I said it was for a toff, a reg'lar tip-topper; and so it was, s' help me!"

It was at the door of Dudley's sick-room that Carrie informed Max that she had learned a secret from the lips of the sick man, and Max, by a natural impulse of curiosity, nay, m...

"No, I'm not," said she, briskly. "I've only taken my turns; I should look all right if it hadn't been for that long, tiring journey yesterday. I haven't quite got over that yet."

Max helped the detective raise the man from the ground. He was quite dead, and from the position in which they had found him, both men concluded that he had been in the act of c...

Max fell into a chair. He stared at Dudley for a few moments before he could speak. Dudley's father! The man supposed to have died years and years ago in an asylum abroad, was t...