Where England sets her feet: a romance

When, in the second year of Elizabeth, the Act of Supremacy was passed, there were found only some two hundred in all of the clergy bold enough to dissent from it. Many, it is t...

And for thirteen years the silence imposed upon that complaisant couple was faithfully observed by them. They adhered to the letter of their bond, neither seeking nor desiring i...

The speed of the little party was the speed of Brion, but they made what haste they could, for dusk was closing down, and the road none too free of dangers. At first Bagott woul...

At the _Golden Lion_ by the bull-ring the two halted to drink a sack-posset, for the boy was very spent and weary. Good fifteen miles had they ridden that last day, with three y...

With a snore like the grinding on shingle of a boat’s nose which has been run ashore at the end of a long smooth journey, Brion opened his eyes from a period of the profoundest...

Days passed, and largely in the glamour of those expeditions which were to breed in the boy something more than a reconcilement with his destiny. And indeed, what with vigorous...

One night Brion woke suddenly from a disturbed sleep, and sat up in the dark, his heart thumping. He had been dreaming, and in his dreams it had seemed to him that something sha...

Thenceforth Brion avoided the neighbourhood of the old well-house; he kept that dark cloud of ilex trees at a nervous distance, and did not even care to let his glance wander th...

A wonderful brief episode, as poignant as it had been evanescent! Who was she? The dolefuller spirit was all forgotten by Brion for the time being in the glamour engendered of t...

So began the idyll of a boy and girl. Their preliminary fencing with one another had been all a make-believe: they had been born to meet, and Fate had no real equivocations for...

Motionless as the trunk against which he leaned, Brion stood waiting in the ilex grove. It was a still misty morning, with a blurr of sun in the East, like a lamp burning behind...

Once more the two sat together in the high bower overlooking the glen. No churlish weather had, in all the short course of their idyll, marred its perfection, and still the sun...

O, the mist and the weeping rain! They were there in good earnest when Brion opened his eyes the next morning to a disenchanted world. In the night great sea fogs had trooped in...

It happened timely that there arrived from London at this pass that great consignment of goods and furniture before referred to. The unloading and distribution of the stuff, for...

It was late in July when Brion, returning one noon from a visit to the Glen--where, against his better sentiments, he had found an irresistible attraction in watching the trout...

So the parts were cast, and the new life begun in earnest. What was over was prologue; the real business of the house dated from this moment. Its members fell into their places;...

Somewhere in the late summer of ’77 there came to the Moated Grange early one morning two visitors, of whom one was destined to exert a considerable influence on Brion’s fortune...

A month passed, and still the promised communication from London delayed to come. The interval was spent by Brion in alternations of feverish hope and stoic resignation: now he...

Brion put up at that same _Cock_ tavern in Westminster where he had slept on the first night of his journey westward. It was a well-served hostelry in a good locality, and it wa...

He was as good as his word, and in enthusiastic measure. He was come at last, and sat with his young friend in a private room of the _Cock_ tavern, as brilliant a figure as that...

Brion stopped, and fell into such a deep and frowning reverie that the Captain would not venture to break into it for a while, but sat sipping his mulled wine, and glancing from...

Slowly, as in a theatre, when dark veils are lifted one by one to simulate a gradual dawn, before Brion’s eyes, as they accustomed themselves to the gloom, came into shadowy bei...

Had his fears in any degree been justified? That disquieting suspicion may have just entered Clerivault’s mind, seeking for the clue to some connexion between his young master’s...

‘There was a listening fear in her regard, As if calamity had but begun; As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored th...

It was March, 1585, and but a few weeks remained to Brion before starting on the great adventure. All his and Clerivault’s preparations were made, and they only awaited the sign...

‘Thou hast bound up my wounds, and set me on thine own beast, and brought me to an inn,’ said the stranger. ‘Blessed be thy living witness to Christ’s parable.’

A sky of liquid blue freighted with lazy argosies of clouds; the green lift of the Hoe under, like England on its feet to cry them God speed; drums and fiddles sounding on the q...

Brion gazed, with that smiling question, into Clerivault’s eyes. The ship was six days out on the broad Atlantic, running before a westerly breeze in hazy weather, and they look...

Whether or not the vulnerary water distilled from the plantain in the year of its becoming a bird possessed the phœnix-like properties attributed to it by its concoctor, certain...

To the market-place of Plymouth, up in the high town, twice a week the country folk brought their produce, consisting of eggs and fresh butter, great jars of scalded cream, fat...

They had taken horse for the moors all in the sweet sunrise, for Brion had set his heart on going round by the Glen, which would mean a thirty mile ride in all, and it was neces...

When the crowner, with his twelve good men and true--yokels, for the most part, drawn from the neighbouring farms--came to sit on the body of Quentin Bagott, Scrivener Harnett--...

Stupefied, overwhelmed by the tragedy of the sight before him, Brion sat motionless a moment. Then aware, down the vista of the track, of a swarm of dark shapes issuing from the...

They had ridden over early from Ashburton, and had wandered through the desolate grounds, and seen the hopeless ruin of it all; and at the end, going into the trampled garden, h...