Where the Path Breaks

In dim twilight a spark of life glittered, glinted like a bit of mica catching the sun, on a vast face of gray cliff above a dead gray sea. There was nothing else in the world b...

Hours or years later he waked up with a start, and stared at the light. It was daylight, and he was in an immense room. It seemed big enough for a theater. Perhaps it was a thea...

He turned the page, but for a moment it was a blank, blurred surface, as if everything on it had been blocked out by order of the censor. He found himself counting his own heart...

But the man in the German hospital did not die. He could not, unless he put an end to his own life, and to do that had always seemed to Denin an act of cowardice and weakness. H...

Four-thirty in the afternoon was Eversedge Sibley's hour for leaving his office. If he had cared about escaping earlier he could easily have got away, for since his father's dea...

Denin hardly knew what to think of the telegram which came next morning. It asked him to call at once on Mr. Sibley; but Denin, warned that the manuscript story could not be rea...

John Sanbourne had smiled when he read the critic's prophecy that he was "bound to get letters of appreciation from half the women in the world," and he had thought no more of t...

Denin stood half way up a ladder with a trowel in his hand, when a young man in a Panama hat and a natty suit of gray flannels came swinging jauntily along the path: altogether,...

The thought filled the man's soul and surrounded it as water fills and surrounds a ring fallen into the sea. Barbara had loved him. There was nothing in the world outside that t...

He was working on her portrait, to which he gave every instant of his spare time between dawn and dusk. A strange, elusive impression of a girl it was; a girl in white looking t...

He thought of the girl yearningly, as of a tortured child with the heart of a woman. His pain was peace compared to hers; and it was he--the blind man he called "clear-seeing"--...

When Denin wrote again he ventured to give Barbara the name that she had given him, "Dear Friend." And he enclosed photographs of the Mirador, with its flower-draped balcony, an...

Denin cabled an answer to Barbara, and then began a letter to her. He was in the midst of it, when he was disturbed by a caller, a man he had never seen before. Expecting no one...

"When my mother was taken so desperately ill," Barbara wrote, "every moment had to be for her, except those I could spare now and then for the other invalid. I wanted to wire yo...

To get back the jewel he had thought lost, was to be born into a new life in a new world. Denin had to tell the portrait in the redwood frame, what he felt, for he dared not tel...

There was a great wind wailing over the sea, on the day that Barbara's letter was brought to Denin. The wind seemed to come from the four corners of the earth, laden with all th...

"I'll get out here, please!" said a woman in black, stopping the automobile which had brought her from the railway station within sight of the Fay place. She was tall and slende...