The white countess

It was Gerard Angmering’s beautiful young wife who put these laughing questions to him, on the threshold of the modest little flat in West Kensington where, like most young coup...

“I’m going,” she said in a low voice, “straight to Victoria Street. I’ve been thinking it all over--all night I was thinking--thinking--of what there was to be done--and I know...

Audrey was scarcely more than half conscious when she found herself out in the open air, such air as was to be had on a hot, dusty day at the end of May, with a blazing sun pour...

Standing in the doorway, grasping the portière tightly with her right hand, while her left was pressed against her breast, was a tall, thin woman, dressed from head to foot in w...

“Thank you,” said she, “I don’t want either a prescription or a sleeping draught. I’m quite well, quite sane. I can’t have been deceived. I saw the woman, I heard her speak, I s...

What was she to do? If Mr. Candover had not been her most active if not her only friend, if his manners had not been so tactful, and his delicacy so great that he never came to...

As if by a flash of lightning, she found her whole mind illuminated, and saw at once the meaning of the visit paid to her showrooms by the lady in white.

In that short interruption Johnson had found time to escape, not by the front-door, but back to the card-room, and Mr. Candover, who looked more excited than he usually allowed...

If the skies had fallen, poor Audrey could not have been more utterly bewildered, dismayed and shocked than she was by this frank and deliberate statement of Mr. Candover’s that...

Now this affair, unpleasant as it was, had been very promptly and satisfactorily settled, and Audrey felt that she ought to feel more contented than she did about it. Mr. Candov...

Her tongue, her brain, her limbs seemed paralysed, and she could do nothing but press her face forward between the little branches of the shrubs which concealed her from Gerard’...

Audrey came in trembling, and stood facing Lord Clanfield without a word. She had contrived to give the slip to the not over-vigilant Geoffrey, and had flown like the wind acros...

More dead than alive, Audrey, when she had left Lord Clanfield’s house, hurried through the flower-garden, where she passed Geoffrey, indignant at her having given him the slip...

It was one of the terrible evenings which Audrey had begun to hate, pleasant though every one tried to make them to her. The guests were lively and bright, always complimentary...

“And as I find you are a very beautiful woman, my suspicion is confirmed. You are one of his victims, or his tools, as all the pretty women whom he meets become.”

In the second place, she would no longer allow herself to be used as a decoy by this man, who, if half what her late visitor had said should prove to be true, was no better than...

There was a silence of amazement, of doubt, of consternation; and the men who thronged the showroom looked at each other, and then at the daring woman who had brought this accus...

The story reached the clubs before the afternoon was over, and on every hand it was discussed, with variations of all sorts, until poor Audrey herself would hardly have recognis...

When, later in the same day, she had made the important discovery that Mademoiselle Laure was really Mr. Candover’s sister, her first impulse was to challenge the woman, and to...

In the first moment of this unexpected meeting, Audrey, still with nerves strung up by the recent interview with Sir Barnaby and the unpleasant associations called up by his wor...

Audrey, when the blow had fallen, neither screamed nor fainted, nor even moved. She heard the man’s words with a dumb, awful consciousness that what she had dimly feared had hap...

Both husband and wife were in a whirl of excitement so intense that for a little while they could do nothing, say nothing, but look at each other and exchange muttered and incoh...

“I don’t think he is dead, after all. Look here! There’s a doctor who lives quite close--a Dr. Fendall. Go and fetch him. And mind you come back, there’s a good chap. We may wan...

“Have I, dear? How?” asked Audrey, trying to smile, and meanwhile wondering who were in the rooms at the back, the shut-up rooms which Mademoiselle Laure kept to herself. Was Mr...

Now there was upon the face of Mademoiselle Laure, as she followed Mr. Candover and Babs downstairs, with Pamela struggling to get free from the firm grasp of her lean fingers,...

From the first moment when, a month previously, the police had got upon the traces of Mr. Candover as the actual forger of the cheques by means of which Sir Richmond Hornthwaite...