The Zeppelin's Passenger

Sir Henry softly turned the key, opened the door, and admitted Griffiths. The man seemed to see no one else but Lessingham. He would have hastened at once towards him, but Sir H...

“That's all right,” he replied. “Listen. Don't say a word about my arrival to your mistress at present. I have some writing to do. Bring me a glass of sherry at once, or mix a c...

Sir Henry was in a pleasant and expansive humour that evening. The new cook was an unqualified success, and he was conscious of having dined exceedingly well. He sat in a comfor...

It seemed to the two women, brief though the period of actual silence was, that in those few seconds they jointly conceived definite and lasting impressions of the man who was t...

“I left Mr. Lessingham last night, your ladyship,” Mills explained, “in a suit of the master's clothes and apparently preparing for bed--I should say this morning, as it was pro...

“To be practical,” she began, “we have no time to lose. I will go and get a suit of Dick's clothes, and, Helen, you had better take Mr. Lessingham into the gun room. Afterwards,...

Philippa, even for some moments after the departure of Captain Griffiths and his myrmidons, remained in a sort of nerveless trance. The crisis, with its bewildering denouement,...

Philippa and Helen met in the drawing-room, a few minutes before eight that evening. Philippa was wearing a new black dress, a model of simplicity to the untutored eye, but full...

Philippa and Helen started, a few mornings later, for one of their customary walks. The crystalline October sunshine, in which every distant tree and, seaward, each slowly trave...

Sir Henry was standing with his hands in his pockets and a very blank expression upon his face, looking out upon the Admiralty Square. He was alone in a large, barely furnished...

It was a happy, if a trifle hysterical little dinner party that evening at Mainsail Haul. Philippa was at times unusually silent, but Helen had expanded in the joy of her great...

Punctually at 12 o'clock the next morning, Lessingham presented himself at the hotel in Dover Street and was invited by the hall porter to take a seat in the lounge. Philippa en...

She threw herself back in her chair and laughed. “How amusing it would be if it weren't all so terrible! You really are a perfect political Raffles. Do you know that this aftern...

“What with Henry and Mr. Lessingham both away,” Helen continued, “and Captain Griffiths not coming near the place, we really have reverted to the normal, haven't we? I wonder--i...

Philippa, late that afternoon, found what she sought--solitude. She had walked along the sands until Dreymarsh lay out of sight on the other side of a spur of the cliffs. Before...

“Tell me, Mr. Lessingham,” Philippa insisted, “exactly what are you thinking of? You looked so dark and mysterious from the ridge below that I've climbed up on purpose to ask you.”

“Look here,” Richard went on, “I'm groping about a bit. I don't understand. Forgive me if I run off the track. I'm not forgetting our friendship, Maderstrom, or what I owe to yo...

“I listened to what he had to say,” she confessed. “It didn't occur to you, I suppose,” her husband remarked, with somewhat strained sarcasm, “that you were another man's wife?”

Philippa's fingers rested for a moment upon the keyboard of the piano before which she was seated, awaiting Lessingham's arrival. Then she glanced at the clock. It was ten minut...

The woman who paused for a moment upon the threshold of the library, looking in upon the little company, was undeniably beautiful. She had masses of red-gold hair, a little diso...

“Never heard a sound,” the younger of the afternoon callers admitted, getting rid of his empty cup and leaning forward in his low chair. “No more tea, thank you, Miss Fairclough...

“More or less, but never quite to this extent. The thing has become an obsession with him lately. If you are really going to stay and talk with me, do you mind if we don't discu...

Towards three o'clock on the following afternoon, the boisterous wind of an uncertain morning settled down to worse things. It tore the spray from the crest of the gathering wav...

Lessingham sat upon a fallen tree on Dutchman's Common near the scene of his romantic descent, and looked rather ruefully over the moorland, seawards. Above him, the sky was cov...

Mr. William Hayter, in the solitude of his chambers at the Milan Court, was a very altered personage. He extended no welcoming salutation to his midnight visitor but simply moti...

A new tenseness seemed to have crept into the situation. The conversation, never without its emotional tendencies, at once changed its character. Philippa, cold and reserved, wi...

“Don't be silly,” she admonished. “You're nothing of the sort. But, of course, we are skating on rather thin ice. If I had Henry to consider in any way, if he had any sort of a...

Lessingham stood for a moment by the side of the car from which he had just descended, glanced at the huge tyres and the tins of petrol lashed on behind.

For a moment Philippa was unsteady upon her feet. Lessingham led her to a chair. From outside came the low, cautious hooting of the motor horn, calling to its dilatory passenger.

Jimmy Dumble possessed a very red face and an extraordinary capacity for silence. He stood a yard or two inside the room, twirling his hat in his hand. Sir Henry, after the clos...

To Major Richard Felstead, Mills' announcement was without significance. For the first time he became conscious, however, of something which seemed almost like a secret understa...

“I'm afraid he didn't show you much sport,” Sir Henry observed. “From what Jimmy Dumble's brother told him, he seems to have taken you in entirely the wrong direction, and on th...

The confinement of the house, after the departure of her unwelcome visitor, stifled Philippa. Attired in a mackintosh, with a scarf around her head, she made her way on to the q...