The room had three occupants, two were men, the third a woman. The men were middle-aged and gray-haired, the woman on the contrary was in the prime of youth; she was finely made, and well proportioned. Her face was perhaps rather too pale, but the eyes and brow were noble, and the sensitive mouth showed indications of heart as well as intellect. The girl, or rather young woman, for she was past five and twenty, sat by the fire, a book on her knee. The two men had drawn chairs close to a table. The elder of these men bore such an unmistakable likeness to the girl, that even the most casual...

There was, of course, the Lower Glen, which consisted of boggy places and endless mists in winter, and a small uninteresting village, where the barest necessaries of life could be bought, and where the folks were all of the humbler class, well-meaning, hard-working, but, alas poor of the poor. When all was said and done, the Lower Glen was a poor place, meant for poor people. Very different was the Upper Glen. It was beyond doubt a most beautiful region, and as Edinburgh and Glasgow were only some fifty miles away, in these days of motor-cars it was easy to drive there for the good things of...

Amongst the crowd of people who were waiting in the Out-Patients' Department of the London Hospital on a certain foggy day toward the latter end of November might have been seen an old cherry-cheeked woman. She had bright blue eyes and firm, kindly lips. She was a little woman, slightly made, and her whole dress and appearance were somewhat old-fashioned. In the first place, she was wonderfully pretty. Her little face looked something like a russet apple, so clear was her complexion and so bright and true the light in her eyes. Her hair was snow-white, and rather fluffy in texture; it...

"And how is she to-day, Nan?" said the kindly voice of Mrs. Richmond. The time was early spring. The lady in question had come into a dark and somewhat dismal room; she herself was richly wrapped in furs and velvet; her large, smooth face was all beams and smiles. A dark little girl with thin cheeks, about eleven years of age, clasping a battered doll in her arms, looked full up at her. "She is no better," said Nan; "and I think perhaps it would be a good plan for you to go." "What a little monkey you are " said Mrs. Richmond. "But I do not mind you, my dear Anna; I have known you too long....

It was a very sunny June day, and a girl was pacing up and down a sheltered path in an old-fashioned garden. She walked slowly along the narrow graveled walk, now and then glancing at the carefully trimmed flowers of an elaborate ribbon border at her right, and stopping for an instant to note the promise of fruit on some well-laden peach and pear-trees. The hot sun was pouring down almost vertical rays on her uncovered head, but she was either impervious to its power, or, like a salamander, she rejoiced in its fierce noonday heat. "We have a good promise of peaches and pears," she said to...

The boys were most troublesome. They never would mind in the very least when father had one of his worst headaches. It was not that they did not try to be good-I will say that Alex had the kindest heart, and that Charley was good-natured too-but it seemed to me as though they could not walk quietly; they would stump upstairs, and they would go heavily across the big attic where they slept, and father was so fearfully sensitive; the least sound made him start up, and then he would get into a sort of frenzy and hardly know what he was doing. He would call out to the boys and thunder to them to...

Yes, I, Gwladys, must write it down; the whole country has heard of it, the newspapers have been full of it, and from the highest to the lowest in the land, people have spoken of the noble deed done by a few Welsh miners. But much as the country knows, and glad and proud as the country is, I don't think she knows quite all-not exactly what mother and I know; she does not know the heart history of those ten days. This is the story within the other well-known story, which I want to write here.

Of course there was a baby in the case-a baby and mongrel dog, and a little boy and girl. They baby was small, and not particularly fair, but it had round limbs and a dimple or two, and a soft, half-pathetic, half-doggy look in its blue eyes, and the usual knack, which most helpless little babies have, of twining itself round the hearts of those who took care of it. The caretakers of this baby were the two children and the dog. Of course a woman, who went by the name of nurse, did duty somewhere in the background; she washed the baby and dressed it in the morning, and she undressed it at...

Philip Ogilvie and his pretty wife were quarrelling, as their custom was, in the drawing-room of the great house in Belgrave Square, but the Angel in the nursery upstairs knew nothing at all about that. She was eight years old, and was, at that critical moment when her father and mother were having words which might embitter all their lives, and perhaps sever them for ever, unconsciously and happily decorating herself before the nursery looking-glass. The occasion was an important one, and the Angel's rosebud lips were pursed up in her anxiety, and her dark, pretty brows were somewhat raised,...

Haddo Court had been a great school for girls for many generations. In fact, for considerably over a century the Court had descended from mother to daughter, who invariably, whatever her husband's name, took the name of Haddo when she became mistress of the school. The reigning mistress might sometimes be unmarried, sometimes the reverse; but she was always, in the true sense of the word, a noble, upright, generous sort of woman, and one slightly in advance of her generation. There had never been anything low or mean known about the various head mistresses of Haddo Court. The school had grown...