The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains. Turbulently⁠—for they still remember their mountain source⁠—the united st...

The little town of Vezza stands at the confluence of two torrents that come down in two deep valleys from the Apuan mountains. Turbulently⁠—for they still remember their mountain source⁠—the united st...

Mrs. Aldwinkle, when she returned, found them on the upper terrace, looking at the view. It was almost the hour of sunset. The town of Vezza at their feet was already eclipsed by the shadow of the gre...

Dinner was served in the Saloon of the Ancestors. In Mrs. Aldwinkle’s enthusiastic imagination what marvellous symposia had been held within those walls⁠—centuries even before they were built⁠—what in...

Mrs. Aldwinkle had even bought the stars. “How bright they are!” she exclaimed, as she stepped out at the head of her little troop of guests on to the terrace. “And how they twinkle! How they palpitat...

The black silhouette that on the terrace had so perfunctorily symbolized Mr. Cardan transformed itself as he entered the lamp-lit saloon into the complete and genial man. His red face twinkled in the ...

To be torn between divided allegiances is the painful fate of almost every human being. Pull devil, pull baker; pull flesh, pull spirit; pull love, pull duty; pull reason and pull hallowed prejudice. ...

To say good night definitely and for the last time was a thing which Mrs. Aldwinkle found most horribly difficult. With those two fatal words she pronounced sentence of death on yet another day (on ye...

To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt’s hair. For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True, it was sometimes an agony for her to keep awake and the s...

In the silence and solitude of her room, Miss Thriplow sat up for a long time, pen in hand, in front of an open notebook. “Darling Jim,” she wrote, “darling Jim. Today you came back to me so suddenly ...

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on...

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on...

Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the silence, I intimately felt the truth of it. For if of old the sons of squires And livery stable keepers turned To flowers and h...

I remember an advertisement⁠—for some sort of cough drops I think it was⁠—which used to figure very largely in my boyhood on the back covers of the illustrated weeklies. Over the legend, “A Pine Fores...

At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my mother thoroughly and wholeheartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks which she still preserves, along with the locks of my pale...

“Quite the little poet”⁠—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark! Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera⁠—a little artist and a...

Such, then, were the phantoms that my recitation called up to dance on the surface of the Tyrrhenian. Salutarily they reminded me that I was only on my holiday, that the landscape in the midst of whic...

No escape.⁠ ⁠… But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary flash. It came and it passed again, almost immediately, as I be...

Do all he could, Lord Hovenden had somehow found it impossible, these last few days, to get Irene for a moment to himself. The change had come about almost suddenly, just after that fellow Chelifer ha...

Do all he could, Lord Hovenden had somehow found it impossible, these last few days, to get Irene for a moment to himself. The change had come about almost suddenly, just after that fellow Chelifer ha...

“We two,” said Mr. Cardan one late afternoon some fortnight after Chelifer’s arrival, “we two seem to be rather left out of it.” “Left out of what?” asked Mr. Falx. “Out of love,” said Mr. Cardan. He ...

It was a pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially loved to hear her. There w...

“Why have you been so funny all vese days?” Lord Hovenden had at last brought himself to put the long-premeditated question. “Funny?” Irene echoed on another note, trying to make a joke of it, as thou...

“When the butcher’s boy tells you in confidence, and with an eye to a tip, that the grocer’s brother has a very fine piece of very old sculpture which he is prepared to part with for a moderate consid...

The sun had set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle of the flat plain at their feet. He was standing on the...

The dining-room was also large and bare. Four candles burned on the long narrow table; their golden brightness faded in the remoter corners to faint twilight; the shadows were huge and black. Entering...

Next morning Mr. Cardan was down early. The first thing he saw in the desolate garden before the house was Miss Elver. She was dressed in a frock cut on the same sack-like lines as her last night’s dr...

Early the next morning Mr. Cardan and his hostess left the house and walked rapidly away through the fields in the direction of the lake. They had told the old woman that they would be back to a late ...

Mr. Cardan returned to the palace of the Cybo Malaspina to find that the number of guests had been increased during his absence by the arrival of Mrs. Chelifer. Mrs. Aldwinkle had not been particularl...

It was night. Half undressed, Irene was sitting on the edge of her bed stitching away at an unfinished garment of pale pink silk. Her head was bent over her work and her thick hair hung perpendicularl...

Miss Thriplow was writing in her secret notebook. “There are people,” she wrote, “who seem to have no capacity for feeling deeply or passionately about anything. It is a kind of emotional impotence fo...

Calamy lay on his back, quite still, looking up into the darkness. Up there, he was thinking, so near that it’s only a question of reaching out a hand to draw back the curtaining darkness that conceal...

Lord Hovenden detached from his motor car was an entirely different being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of languor behind the steering-wheel of a Vauxhall Velox. Half an...

Lord Hovenden detached from his motor car was an entirely different being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of languor behind the steering-wheel of a Vauxhall Velox. Half an...

Time and space, matter and mind, subject, object⁠—how inextricably they got mixed, next day, on the road to Rome! The simple-minded traveller who imagines himself to be driving quietly through Umbria ...

From the heights of the Pincio Mr. Falx denounced the city that lay spread out below him. “Marvellous, isn’t it?” Mrs. Aldwinkle had said. Rome was one of her private properties. “But every stone of i...

Mr. Falx had expected to find no difficulty, once they were arrived in Rome, in recalling his pupil to what he considered a better and more serious frame of mind. In the bracing atmosphere of an Inter...

“An pris caruns flucuthukh”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitiv...

“But at Montefiascone,” said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious name, “at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s servant found good win...

In the sporting calendar the most interesting events are booked for the autumnal months. There is no hunting in the spring. And even in Italy there is a brief close season for songbirds that lasts fro...

From the first nobody put very much faith in the local doctor; the mere look of him was enough to inspire mistrust. But when across the patient’s prostrate and comatose body he chattily confided that ...

The funeral was not due to take place before sunset. The bearers, the choristers, the sexton, the priest himself, most likely, were all in the fields, picking the grapes. They had something more impor...

“What are you thinking of?” “Nothing,” said Calamy. “Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.” “Nothing in particular,” he repeated. “Tell me,” Mary insisted. “I want to know.” “Wel...

“What are you thinking of?” “Nothing,” said Calamy. “Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.” “Nothing in particular,” he repeated. “Tell me,” Mary insisted. “I want to know.” “Wel...

On their return, somewhat low-spirited, from Montefiascone, Mrs. Aldwinkle and her party found Mary Thriplow alone in the palace. “And Calamy?” Mrs. Aldwinkle inquired. “He’s gone into the mountains,”...

In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s notebook had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet c...

It had been raining, stormily; but now the wind had fallen and between the heavy clouds the sun was brightly shining. The yellowing chestnut trees stood motionless in the still bright air, glittering ...