When love dawns

“Why didn’t you tell me?” The girl had her back turned on the extravagant, luxurious room and its one other occupant. Her voice was full of anger and she stared out of the windo...

Exactly what she had done to make herself look so pathetic and yet so dignified her stepsister did not know. She looked precisely as a deserted wife should look; tremulously bra...

“Magdalen!” she said with a sudden sharp appeal as the girl came back from putting Ronald to bed, “I can’t stand this. It’s only seven and I won’t sit thinking till twelve. Go a...

The dark man’s knowledge of the restaurant was evidently as accurate as his acquaintance with the locality of the switch which would plunge it in darkness. How he piloted them M...

In their pink drawing-room the sisters sat at breakfast, both neat in black gowns, since goodness knew who might come to see Dolly; both oddly silent; both looking furtively at...

There was no shadow of doubt to cast on her claims; the dead man had kept his word and left a will that made them irrefutable. Without talk of law or courts, with merely a trium...

“Ardmore Castle!” said the station-master in broad Scotch; “ye’ll be going there? Well, they’ve no sent for ye. Ye can get a fly to the ferry.” And he turned away.

In the cold dawn Magdalen Clyde got out of the hideous four-poster where she had tossed all night, and with shaking hands rekindled the dead fire. When a blaze was roaring up th...

It is hard to tell how commonplace things grow slowly into terror, intangible and unseen, but sure as death. Into the dull life at Ardmore Castle horror had crept; even Dolly co...

For once the sun shone into those southern rooms next morning when Lady Barnysdale woke, and for an instant it cheered her. Rain would have meant another day in this dull, eery...

Lady Barnysdale’s tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth; her dry lips shaped the words she could not say. She sprang to the bell and a hand drew hers from the bell-rope.

It was nonsense Mrs. Keith’s pretending not to know when she had been in the house more than a month, and had been followed wherever she went for a week.

“Say?” she cried. “It was I that said! We’re to go to-night--to London. The horses came this morning anyhow. Magdalen,” with a sudden doubt, “I don’t know what to think about hi...

Magdalen had noted that there was something queer about the boy on the box, something terrifying in the look of him where he sat in a hunched heap, regardless of the driving rai...

The girl who sat by the fire started. That ceaseless question of all last night had been silent for the last four hours; she had thought that when Dolly had slept she would wake...

In a black temper he plodded through his developing, washed his hands, decided the afternoon was too gray for photographic printing, and walking out incontinently crossed Fleet...

Up and down the empty corridors of an empty house Mrs. Keith walked, gaunt and old. Never in all her seventy years had it come home to her that Ardmore Castle was an eery house...

Aunt Manette sat alone in her neat room at her eternal knitting. If her blind eyes could not see the comfort of her glowing coal fire and her shining lamp, perhaps she felt it,...

She took a lodging opposite the Court Street branch of the London and Provincial Bank, certainly, but she was seldom in it, and never once looked out of the window. There was pl...

In the brougham Magdalen sat petrified with amazement. It had been Mrs. Keith, and no other, at the window, crooked bonneted, wild-eyed, motioning frantically to her not to stop...

“My dear Dolly!” said Mr. Starr-Dalton; he looked round him with an air of lordly disgust. “You’ll forgive my saying that this--this surrounding--is a very queer freak for a lit...

He stood in the sunny street at a time when a conscientious photographer’s assistant should have been hard at work, and was annoyed at his own discomfiture. Because a girl was a...

It was not much of a congratulation on her sister’s engagement and she had gone out without another word. The little sitting-room in Hare’s Buildings seemed very dull and cheerl...

All thought and desire for the hat-making business had deserted Magdalen’s mind when she came, late and heavy-eyed, to breakfast. Which was probably the reason that on the sound...

Somehow Magdalen pulled herself together. Fool that she had been to have let Dolly take this place without seeing it; more fool still never to have found out that the bookcase h...

The whole thing had perhaps taken ten minutes; ten years without it would have taken less strength from Magdalen Clyde. The world had fallen down about her ears; Lovell, her lov...

“Ye’re here. I’ve found ye!” she cried the instant the door opened. “Bring her here that I may speak with her. No!” and she pushed away like a leaf the door Dolly would have shu...

Lord Stratharden sat in his own bedroom in the little maisonette that opportune whitewashing of his had allowed him to return to as if he had never fled from it, and pursued a p...

There is a drug in the hellish pharmacopœia of China, to prevent the further manufacture of which tender-hearted people should go on their knees and pray the allied powers may s...

Lord Stratharden rose with unusual alacrity the next morning. He had thought out all he meant to do and he had best do it. In the gray dawn he had had a sudden uncomfortable ide...

There was very little look of such a seizure on Mrs. Keith’s face as she let herself softly out of his house at five o’clock in the morning. She stood and shook her fist at the...

He glanced angrily at Churchill, who was too long in dying, and drew a coverlet over his face. Asleep or not asleep, he need have no chance of seeing what Ah Lee went out and br...

Lord Stratharden took one long, comfortable glance at Dolly Barnysdale before he turned to go. He had half a mind to tell her that Starr-Dalton had betrayed her into his hand; b...

Lovell, and it was the last day he would ever call himself so, stood speechless in Ah Lee’s opium shop. Beside him was a sergeant and half-a-dozen policemen; in front of him som...