Vera Nevill

About five miles from Kynaston Hall, as the crow flies, across the fields, stood, as the house-agents would have described it, "a large and commodious modern mansion, standing i...

When the lute is broken, Sweet notes are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. As music and splendour Survive not the lamp and the lute, The...

It was the fag end of the London season; people were talking about Goodwood and the Ryde week, about grouse and about salmon-fishing. Members of Parliament went about, like mart...

Two or three days later the east wind was still blowing, and the chilled sunshine still feebly shining down upon the nipped lilac and laburnum blossoms. The garden at Walpole Lo...

Lady Kynaston sat alone in her little morning-room; as far as she knew, she was alone in the house; Mrs. Romer had driven into London, on the cares of her trousseau intent, and...

I imagine that the most fretting and wearing of all the pains and penalties which it is the lot of humanity to undergo in this troublesome and naughty world are those which, by...

The speaker stood by the window of one of the large houses at Prince's Gate overlooking the Horticultural Gardens. She was a small, slight woman, with fair pale features and a m...

Once at least in a man's life, if only for a brief space, he reverences the saint in the woman he desires. He may love and pursue again and again, but she who has power to hold...

Why cannot I forgo, forget That ever I loved thee, that ever we met? There is not a single link or sign To bind thy life in this world with mine.

Only the wind here hovers and revels In a round where life seems barren as death. Here there was laughing of old, there was weeping, Haply of lovers none ever will know.

Alas! how easily things go wrong, A word too much, or a sigh too long; And there comes a mist and a driving rain, And life is never the same again.

Or art thou complaining Of thy lowly lot, And, thine own disdaining, Dost ask what thou hast not? Of the future dreaming, Weary of the past, For the present scheming All but wha...

Hide in thy bosom, poor unfortunate, That love which is thy torture and thy crime, Or cry aloud to those departed hosts Of ghostly lovers! can they be more deaf To thy disaster...

To ascertain rightly how Mr. Pryme and Miss Miller came to be found in the parish of Tripton at nine o'clock in the morning, standing together under a wet hedge-row, it will be...

Mr. Herbert Pryme stood by a much ink-stained and littered table in his chambers in the Temple, with his hands in his trousers pockets, whistling a slow and melancholy tune.

Amongst the divers domestic complications into which short-sighted man is prone to fall there is none which has been more conclusively proved to be an utter and egregious failur...

Sir John Kynaston sat alone in his old-bachelor rooms in London. They were dark, dingy rooms, such as are to be found in countless numbers among the narrow streets that encompas...

I have often wondered why, in the ordering of human destinies, some special Providence, some guardian spirit who is gifted with foreknowledge, is not mercifully told off to each...

A bright May morning, cold, it is true, and with a biting wind from the east--as indeed our English May mornings generally are--but sunny and cloudless as the heart can desire....

The great belt of fir-trees beyond it, the sheltering evergreens on the nearer side, the tiers of grey, moss-grown steps that encompassed it about, all found their image again u...

For a wedding feast there is a reasonable cause, just as there is for a funeral luncheon, or a christening dinner. There has been in each instance a trying ordeal to be gone thr...

It had all come about so rapidly, and withal so quietly, that, when Vera came to think of it, it rather took her breath away. She had expected it, of course; indeed, she had eve...

Mrs. Macpherson had brought up her daughters with one fixed and predominant idea in her mind. Each of them was to excel in some one taste or accomplishment, by virtue of which t...

Go, forget me; why should sorrow O'er that brow a shadow fling? Go, forget me, and to-morrow Brightly smile and sweetly sing. Smile--though I shall not be near thee; Sing--thoug...

Old Lady Kynaston arrived at Shadonake in the worst possible temper. Her butler and factotum, who always made every arrangement for her when she was about to travel, had for onc...

The scene is Mrs. Hazeldine's drawing-room, in Park Lane, the hour is four o'clock in the afternoon, and the _dramatis personæ_ are Miss Nevill, very red in the face, standing i...

The station at Sutton stood perched up above the village on a high embankment, upon which the railway crossed the valley from the hills that lay to the north to those that lay t...

"Well, Mr. Pryme, how d'ye do?" said Mr. Miller, in his rough, hearty voice, holding out his hand. "I dare say you are surprised to see me here. I haven't met you since you were...

"It is downright affectation!" says old Mrs. Daintree, angrily, to her daughter-in-law, as she and Marion leave the room together; "no girl can really be indifferent to a weddin...

Before our lives divide for ever, While time is with us and hands are free, (Time swift to fasten, and swift to sever Hand from hand....) I will say no word that a man might say...

"Never again," so speaketh one forsaken, In the blank desolate passion of despair: Never again shall the bright dream I cherished Delude my heart, for bitter truth is there: The...

For nothing on earth is sadder Than the dream that cheated the grasp, The flower that turned to the adder, The fruit that changed to the asp, When the dayspring in darkness clos...

I have done for ever with all these things: The songs are ended, the deeds are done; There shall none of them gladden me now, not one. There is nothing good for me under the sun...

He had not been mistaken. It was Helen who had crept out after him in the darkness, and whose slight figure, in her pale blue dress, stood close by him in an angle of the road.

Open, dark grave, and take her: Though we have loved her so, Yet we must now forsake her: Love will no more awake her: Oh bitter woe! Open thine arms and take her To rest below!

"You may make your mind quite easy; it is impossible that there should be another man foolish enough in all England to want to make love to such an 'ugly duckling' as I am!"

Leaning against a window-frame at the end of a long corridor on the second floor, and idly looking out over the view of the wide lawns and empty flower-beds which it commands, s...