“Be quiet, children,” said Mrs. Marble. “Can’t you see that father’s busy?” So he was. He propped his aching forehead on his hand, and tugged at his reddish moustache in an unhappy attempt at concentr...

When Annie Marble woke in the early morning she was oppressed with a headache⁠—a real headache, this time. She had had a restless night, although, true to his word, astonishingly enough, her husband h...

Yet for some weeks Mr. Marble hesitated about changing those five-pound notes. He was of mixed character. When he had been a rat in a corner he had fought like one, desperately, to the last risk, but ...

At the Bank, as was only to be expected, they had noticed a slight change in Mr. Marble’s manner of late. He always looked worried, and clearly often he had been drinking. The head of the department t...

Mr. Marble was paying. He was paying by the feeling of weary misery from which he suffered as he walked that day across London Bridge, as he stood exhausted in the train, and in the bus which brought ...

Mr. Marble arrived home one evening lighter of step and of heart than he had been for some time previously. Even when the shadow of the gallows lies across one’s path one cannot help feeling a little ...

Mr. Marble was, of course, deceiving himself when he imagined that his wife could deduce all that had happened from his halfhearted exclamations that night. He realized this as time passed. She could ...

Next week kept all Malcolm Road on tiptoe. Various rumours had been flying round about Mr. Marble’s suddenly acquired wealth, stating its amount and its manner of coming in twenty different ways. Yet ...

After this episode matters went for some time exactly as Mr. Marble would have wished. John’s application to enter Sydenham College was favourably received, and he went there without further demur. He...

Madame Collins was a highly successful intriguer, now that she had gained experience and the poise given by experience. To no one in the suburbs, not even to the milk roundsman, is given the opportuni...

There was misery, misery undisguised and rampant, at 53 Malcolm Road. There were only two people living there now. Winnie had gone back to school, glad to escape from her mother’s helpless unhappiness...

There is no solitude like that which one can find in a London suburb. It is desolate, appalling. The weeks that passed now found the Marbles lost in this solitude, and over them, like a constant menac...

The peace that had been so rudely disturbed was only with difficulty regained. The Marbles found it hard to settle down once more into the old groove. And no sooner had they begun to do so than anothe...

And so, incredible as it might seem, sunshine had come again for a space to 53 Malcolm Road. The black pall of terror was lifted, and Annie Marble actually went singing in her high, cracked voice up a...

And now began the darkest period in all Annie Marble’s unhappy life, the last few weeks before its unhappy end. The shadows had massed about 53 Malcolm Road, and as they clustered round ready for the ...

Mr. Marble had just finished his preliminary morning’s work when Dr. Atkinson’s rat-tat-tat came at the door. “How is she this morning?” asked Atkinson as they went up the stairs together. “She seemed...