Those barren leaves

The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains. Turbulently—for they still remember their mountain...

Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed b...

Dinner was served in the Saloon of the Ancestors. In Mrs. Aldwinkle’s enthusiastic imagination what marvellous symposia had been held within those walls—centuries even before th...

“How bright they are!” she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of her little troop of guests on to the terrace. “And how they twinkle! How they palpitate! As though they w...

The black silhouette that on the terrace had so perfunctorily symbolised Mr. Cardan transformed itself as he entered the lamp-lit saloon into the complete and genial man. His re...

To be torn between divided allegiances is the painful fate of almost every human being. Pull devil, pull baker; pull flesh, pull spirit; pull love, pull duty; pull reason and pu...

To say good-night definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on...

To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt’s hair. For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True, it was sometimes an agony for her...

In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long time, pen in hand, in front of an open note-book. “Darling Jim,” she wrote, “darling Jim. To-day you cam...

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid se...

For if of old the sons of squires And livery stable keepers turned To flowers and hope, to Greece and God, We, in our later age have learned That we are native where we walk.

I remember an advertisement—for some sort of cough drops I think it was—which used to figure very largely in my boyhood on the back covers of the illustrated weeklies. Over the...

At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my mother thoroughly and whole-heartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks which she still preserves, along w...

“Quite the little poet”—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark. Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera—...

Such, then, were the phantoms that my recitation called up to dance on the surface of the Tyrrhenian. Salutarily they reminded me that I was only on my holiday, that the landsca...

No escape.... But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary flash. It came and it passed again, almos...

Do all he could, Lord Hovenden had somehow found it impossible, these last few days, to get Irene for a moment to himself. The change had come about almost suddenly, just after...

“Out of love,” said Mr. Cardan. He looked down over the balustrade. On the next terrace below, Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle were walking slowly up and down. On the terrace below...

It was a pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially lov...

They were sitting in the thin luminous shadow of the olive trees. The bright sky looked down at them between the sparse twi-coloured leaves. On the parched grass about the roots...

“When the butcher’s boy tells you in confidence, and with an eye to a tip, that the grocer’s brother has a very fine piece of very old sculpture which he is prepared to part wit...

The sun had set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle of the flat plain at their feet....

The dining-room was also large and bare. Four candles burned on the long narrow table; their golden brightness faded in the remoter corners to faint twilight; the shadows were h...

Next morning Mr. Cardan was down early. The first thing he saw in the desolate garden before the house was Miss Elver. She was dressed in a frock cut on the same sack-like lines...

Early the next morning Mr. Cardan and his hostess left the house and walked rapidly away through the fields in the direction of the lake. They had told the old woman that they w...

Mr. Cardan returned to the palace of the Cybo Malaspina to find that the number of guests had been increased during his absence by the arrival of Mrs. Chelifer. Mrs. Aldwinkle h...

It was night. Half undressed, Irene was sitting on the edge of her bed stitching away at an unfinished garment of pale pink silk. Her head was bent over her work and her thick h...

Miss Thriplow was writing in her secret note-book. “There are people,” she wrote, “who seem to have no capacity for feeling deeply or passionately about anything. It is a kind o...

Calamy lay on his back, quite still, looking up into the darkness. Up there, he was thinking, so near that it’s only a question of reaching out a hand to draw back the curtainin...

Lord Hovenden detached from his motor car was an entirely different being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of languor behind the steering-wheel of a...

Time and space, matter and mind, subject, object—how inextricably they got mixed, next day, on the road to Rome! The simple-minded traveller who imagines himself to be driving q...

“But every stone of it,” said Mr. Falx, “raised by slave labour. Every stone! Millions of wretches have sweated and toiled and died”—Mr. Falx’s voice rose, his language became r...

Mr. Falx had expected to find no difficulty, once they were arrived in Rome, in recalling his pupil to what he considered a better and more serious frame of mind. In the bracing...

“_An pris caruns flucuthukh_”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly...

“But at Montefiascone,” said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious name, “at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s...

In the sporting calendar the most interesting events are booked for the autumnal months. There is no hunting in the spring. And even in Italy there is a brief close season for s...

From the first nobody put very much faith in the local doctor; the mere look of him was enough to inspire mistrust. But when across the patient’s prostrate and comatose body he...

The funeral was not due to take place before sunset. The bearers, the choristers, the sexton, the priest himself, most likely, were all in the fields, picking the grapes. They h...

But she interrupted him. “And why did you hold up your hand like that? And spread out the fingers? I could see it, you know; against the window.” Pitch dark it was in the room,...

“He felt like that,” Mary answered. “He wanted to be alone to think. I understand it so well. The prospect of your return filled him almost with terror. He went off two or three...

In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s note-book had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion...

It had been raining, stormily; but now the wind had fallen and between the heavy clouds the sun was brightly shining. The yellowing chestnut trees stood motionless in the still...