Transplanted

Mrs. Hayne’s boarding-house stood on the corner of Market Street and one of those cross streets which seem to leap down from the heights of San Francisco and empty themselves in...

The Civil War had left her family with little but the great prestige of its name and the old house in New Orleans. Nevertheless, the house slaves having refused to accept their...

Lee had no friends of her own age. The large private school she attended was not patronised by the aristocracy of the city, and Mrs. Tarleton had so thoroughly imbued her daught...

Lee sat limply on the edge of her cot wishing she had a husband to button her boots. Mrs. Tarleton had been very ill during the night, and her daughter’s brain and eyes were hea...

The next afternoon Lee made an elaborate toilette. She buttoned her boots properly, sewed a stiff, white ruffle in her best gingham frock, and combed every snarl out of her hair...

Lee awoke first. She remembered at once where she was, and sat up with a sense of terror she had not experienced in the darkness of the night. The fog was gone, the sun was well...

Mr. Maundrell, after despatching two detectives in search of the truants, spent the greater part of the night pacing up and down the upper hall. He called upon Mrs. Tarleton lat...

Lee went neither to school nor to her meals for a week. She nursed her mother with the ardour of maternal affection and remorse. For the first two days Cecil dared not approach...

The tide in Mrs. Tarleton rose once more; on Monday she was able to sit up, and Cecil took Lee for a walk; but returned betimes, having received a brief parental admonition that...

It was something over a week later that Lee awoke suddenly in the night and sat erect, with stiffened muscles. Her skin was chilled as if her sleeping body had been caught in a...

All of Mrs. Tarleton’s old friends sent flowers, and many of them attended the funeral service, which took place in the death chamber. Mrs. Hayne had decided that a church funer...

It was about a month after Mrs. Tarleton’s death that Cecil kicked Lee under the breakfast-table and jerked his eyebrows at his father, who sat opposite. Mr. Maundrell was readi...

After several weeks’ exchange of vague suggestions, Mrs. Montgomery, Mrs. Brannan, Mrs. Geary, and Mrs. Cartright met at the house of the former to discuss the future of Marguer...

That same day she was installed in the old Montgomery house on Rincon Hill. It was a low irregularly built house, wooden, but substantial. The walls of the lower storey were pan...

Her life from eleven to eighteen was very monotonous and very happy. Mrs. Montgomery petted and indulged her, the boys were her slaves, and assured her, every time they came hom...

Cecil, some five months after his eighteenth birthday, went up to Oxford and entered Balliol. Here he gave the cold shoulder to cricket, and took to the water with the enthusias...

A railroad sliced off a corner of Lee’s ranch and paid her a large indemnity, which was invested by Mr. Brannan in first mortgages; and an earthquake presented another section o...

Tiny laughed and made herself comfortable. “You look for all the world like a long white lily in your night-gown,” she said; “but I do believe you are as strong as Randolph.”

Lee smiled sweetly, but one of her shoulders gave an impatient little jerk. Randolph had proposed four times already, since his return from Europe, three weeks ago. Mrs. Montgom...

“Yes,” said Tiny to Lee that night, “you are lovely--_perfectly_ lovely: but it should have been white. I think it was _quite_ weak of us to give way. No girl _ever_ made her dé...

It is little that a girl learns of the world in San Francisco: where the home-bred youths are a remarkable compound of guile and ingenuousness, alcohol and tea-cakes, and where...

Cecil finished his Oxford epoch, taking his double first and crowning his athletic career as stroke of his college eight. He wrote to Lee that he was a wreck mentally, and was g...

Lee spent the following winter in New York and Washington, with friends of Mrs. Montgomery, who met and made much of her Del Monte. Her social success in both places was very gr...

Her admirers had a sorry time of it for the next two weeks; she was capricious, even irritable, absent-minded, and at no pains to conceal that they bored her. Her appetite remai...

“Here comes a tramp up the avenue again,” said Mrs. Montgomery, with irritation. “That makes the second this week. I shall have to build a lodge. Why can’t they go to the farmho...

He returned three days later, clad in immaculate grey, a trunk in his wake containing much smart linen and four suits of clothes, which had been ordered at the best house in San...

They had remained longer at dinner than usual, and when Lee went out to the verandah, she found Mr. and Mrs. Brannan and Mr. Trennahan, a New Yorker who had recently married and...

“I must have the truth, my dear child,” she said. “In the first place, unless you are engaged to Lord Maundrell, I cannot permit you to take these long walks and rides alone wit...

“He certainly can be serious,” she thought; “but I’m sure he hates it. That laugh means either that he’s delighted to forget his momentary drop, or that he’s past master of the...

Several days later she took Cecil to the redwoods. Mrs. Montgomery consented reluctantly--Lee had always been a little beyond her--but put up the lunch herself. They started ear...

“Unless you’ve lost your interest in sport, there’s a chance for you. The grizzly’s a rare bird in California, these times, but the agent of a ranch my mother has in the Santa L...

The next evening, Lee rose abruptly from her seat between Mrs. Yorba and Mrs. Trennahan, who had dined with them, and walked hastily over to Randolph who sat alone in a corner o...

It is seldom that the imagination is disappointed in the “ancestral piles” of England. The United Statesian, particularly, surrounded from birth by all that is commonplace and a...

Although Lee was happy, she had a hard fight with an attack of tearful repining. Surrounded all her life with demonstrative affection, each homecoming after a brief holiday an e...

Lee found no time to think that night. As soon as her maid had left her, Cecil entered from his dressing-room and said that his father would like to see her for a moment before...

She awoke late next morning, after a restless night Cecil had risen without disturbing her and gone to his grouse. In a happier frame of mind she would have indulged in a sentim...

She escaped from the wood into her tower, and wrote a letter to Randolph. She made no attempt at diplomacy; she told him the truth. Randolph loved her, and she was a woman of su...

A fortnight later Lee scanned her new boudoir with complacency and pride. The large tower-room beneath the suite above had been cleared of its rubbish, and she had availed herse...

As Lee sat alone, pondering deeply over her father-in-law’s advice, her American mail was brought up. She opened a letter from Mrs. Montgomery. After several pages of lamentatio...

What Lee did at all she did thoroughly, volatile as she was in some respects; original force of character, fostered and augmented by certain conditions, overbalanced for long pe...

They moved up to town on the third of April. Lady Barnstaple had taken a tiny and costly house for them in Green Street, and as there had been much correspondence on the subject...

Lord Maundrell made a number of speeches, made himself agreeable to many men whom he would have preferred to kick, and received his nomination. The contest was bitter and exciti...

It was not long before Cecil’s abilities were recognised. Something was expected of him, for he came of a line of able Parliamentarians; and as he was already famous as a sports...

A day or two before the end of the season Lee received a letter from Mrs. Montgomery which suggested another variation in the autumn programme. That lady and Randolph were leavi...

Lord Arrowmount and Randolph wrote to Lady Barnstaple that they would arrive at the Abbey on the eleventh; Mrs. Montgomery was indisposed, but hoped to come a week later with La...

They were on top of the fell and had been roaming about all the afternoon. Randolph had begun by amusing her and putting her into the best of tempers, then he had led her on to...

After dinner that night, Lee and Lady Mary Gifford, instead of following the other women, strolled along the corridors for a quiet chat. They were not intimate, for they had too...

Lee went to her bedroom, and, in accord with some curious feminine sympathy of mental and material habit, immediately took off her gown and put on a wrapper. Then she sat down,...

Of course Cecil did the worst thing possible for himself: he appeared just as she had finished elaborating her case and before she had started upon the argument between her high...

Lee slept more soundly that night than she had expected, and awoke the next morning feeling very much ashamed of herself. Her determination to leave England for a time was unalt...

Mrs. Montgomery arrived the next day without Tiny, whose children were ailing. As the following day was Sunday, and as Mrs. Montgomery would hardly let Lee out of her sight, the...

During the following week Lee was not so absorbed in her friends that she would have been oblivious to a certain discomposure of the Abbey’s atmosphere, even had Mary Gifford no...

The next afternoon as Lee was taking tea with the other guests in the library she happened to glance out of the window, and saw Lord Barnstaple returning from the moors, alone....

As Lee walked along the many corridors to her mother-in-law’s rooms she reflected that she was grateful Lord Barnstaple had not refrained from mentioning the diamonds: their vis...

Lee returned to her father-in-law more slowly than she had advanced upon the enemy. She longed desperately for Cecil, but he was the last person in whom she could confide.

He returned her pressure and did not answer at once. Then he said: “No; I think I’d rather you didn’t. If I am to lose you for a year I had better get used to it as soon as poss...

He was sitting at his desk writing; and as he lifted his hand at her abrupt entrance and laid it on an object beside his papers she received no shock of surprise. She went forwa...

She walked rapidly along the corridor toward the tower. But in a moment or two she turned back and went in the direction of the library. It was Randolph’s habit to read there wh...