"There's ingratitude for you " Miss Dolly Foster exclaimed suddenly. "Where " I asked, rousing myself from meditation. She pointed to a young man who had just passed where we sat. He was dressed very smartly, and was walking with a lady attired in the height of the fashion. "I made that man," said Dolly, "and now he cuts me dead before the whole of the Row It's atrocious. Why, but for me, do you suppose he'd be at this moment engaged to three thousand a year and-and the plainest girl in London?" "Not that," I pleaded; "think of-"

In the garden the question was settled without serious difference of opinion. If Sir Robert Perry really could not go on-and Lady Eynesford was by no means prepared to concede even that-then Mr. Puttock, bourgeois as he was, or Mr. Coxon, conceited and priggish though he might be, must come in. At any rate, the one indisputable fact was the impossibility of Mr. Medland: this was, to Lady Eynesford's mind, axiomatic, and, in the safe privacy of her family circle (for Miss Scaife counted as one of the family, and Captain Heseltine and Mr. Flemyng did not count at all), she went so far as to...

Neither life nor the lawn-tennis club was so full at Natterley that the news of Harry Sterling's return had not some importance. He came back, moreover, to assume a position very different from his old one. He had left Harrow now, departing in the sweet aroma of a long score against Eton at Lord's, and was to go up to Oxford in October. Now between a schoolboy and a University man there is a gulf, indicated unmistakably by the cigarette which adorned Harry's mouth as he walked down the street with a newly acquiescent father, and thoroughly realized by his old playmates.

"Just in time, wasn't it?" asked Mary Arkroyd. "Two days before the-the ceremony Mercifully it had all been kept very quiet, because it was only three months since poor Gilly was killed. I forget whether you ever met Gilly? My half-brother, you know?"

Countless are the stories told of the sayings that Count Antonio spoke and of the deeds that he did when he dwelt an outlaw in the hills. For tales and legends gather round his name thick as the berries hang on a bush, and with the passage of every succeeding year it grows harder to discern where truth lies and where the love of wonder, working together with the sway of a great man's memory, has wrought the embroidery of its fancy on the plain robe of fact.

The house-a large, plain white building with no architectural pretensions-stood on a high swell of the downs and looked across the valley in which Milldean village lay, and thence over rolling stretches of close turf, till the prospect ended in the gleam of waves and the silver-grey mist that lay over the sea. It was a fine, open, free view. The air was fresh, with a touch of salt in it, and made the heat of the sun more than endurable-even welcome and nourishing. Tom Courtland, raising himself from the grass and sitting up straight, gave utterance to what his surroundings declared to be a...

"I'm so blind," said Miss Ferrars plaintively. "Where are my glasses?" "What do you want to see?" asked Lord Semingham. "The man in the corner, talking to Mr. Loring." "Oh, you won't know him even with the glasses. He's the sort of man you must be introduced to three times before there's any chance of a permanent impression." "You seem to recognise him." "I know him in business. We are, or rather are going to be, fellow-directors of a company."

The following narrative falls naturally into three divisions, corresponding to distinct and clearly marked periods of Sophy's life. Of the first and second-her childhood at Morpingham and her sojourn in Paris-the records are fragmentary, and tradition does little to supplement them. As regards Morpingham, the loss is small. The annals of a little maid-servant may be left in vagueness without much loss. Enough remains to show both the manner of child Sophy was and how it fell out that she spread her wings and left the Essex village far behind her. It is a different affair when we come to the...

In accordance with many most excellent precedents, I might begin by claiming the sympathy due to an orphan alone in the world. I might even summon my unguided childhood and the absence of parental training to excuse my faults and extenuate my indiscretions. But the sympathy which I should thus gain would be achieved, I fear, by something very like false pretenses.

Mr Jenkinson Neeld was an elderly man of comfortable private means; he had chambers in Pall Mall, close to the Imperium Club, and his short stoutish figure, topped by a chubby spectacled face, might be seen entering that dignified establishment every day at lunch time, and also at the hour of dinner on the evenings when he had no invitation elsewhere. He had once practised at the Bar, and liked to explain that he had deserted his profession for the pursuit of literature. He did not, however, write on his own account; he edited. He would edit anything provided there was no great public demand...