As the Milvains sat down to breakfast the clock of Wattleborough parish church struck eight; it was two miles away, but the strokes were borne very distinctly on the west wind this autumn morning. Jas...

“I think” said Jasper, as he entered the room where his mother and Maud were busy with plain needlework, “I must have met Alfred Yule and his daughter.” “How did you recognise them?” Mrs. Milvain inqu...

Jasper’s favourite walk led him to a spot distant perhaps a mile and a half from home. From a tract of common he turned into a short lane which crossed the Great Western railway, and thence by a stile...

Eight flights of stairs, consisting alternately of eight and nine steps. Amy had made the calculation, and wondered what was the cause of this arrangement. The ascent was trying, but then no one could...

Even in mid-rapture of his marriage month he had foreseen this possibility; but fate had hitherto rescued him in sudden ways when he was on the brink of self-abandonment, and it was hard to imagine th...

When her husband had set forth, Amy seated herself in the study and took up a new library volume as if to read. But she had no real intention of doing so; it was always disagreeable to her to sit in t...

Three weeks after her return from the country⁠—which took place a week later than that of Jasper Milvain⁠—Marian Yule was working one afternoon at her usual place in the Museum Reading-room. It was th...

Of the acquaintances Yule had retained from his earlier years several were in the well-defined category of men with unpresentable wives. There was Hinks, for instance, whom, though in anger he spoke o...

After all, there came a day when Edwin Reardon found himself regularly at work once more, ticking off his stipulated quantum of manuscript each four-and-twenty hours. He wrote a very small hand; sixty...

It was natural that Amy should hint dissatisfaction with the loneliness in which her days were mostly spent. She had never lived in a large circle of acquaintances; the narrowness of her mother’s mean...

The last volume was written in fourteen days. In this achievement Reardon rose almost to heroic pitch, for he had much to contend with beyond the mere labour of composition. Scarcely had he begun when...

The prudent course was so obvious that he marvelled at Amy’s failing to suggest it. For people in their circumstances to be paying a rent of fifty pounds when a home could be found for half the money ...

In the spring list of Mr. Jedwood’s publications, announcement was made of a new work by Alfred Yule. It was called English Prose in the Nineteenth Century, and consisted of a number of essays (severa...

Marian walked to the nearest point of Camden Road, and there waited for an omnibus, which conveyed her to within easy reach of the street where Maud and Dora Milvain had their lodgings. This was at th...

The past twelve months had added several years to Edwin Reardon’s seeming age; at thirty-three he would generally have been taken for forty. His bearing, his personal habits, were no longer those of a...

One of Reardon’s minor worries at this time was the fear that by chance he might come upon a review of Margaret Home. Since the publication of his first book he had avoided as far as possible all know...

Amy did not go to church. Before her marriage she had done so as a mere matter of course, accompanying her mother, but Reardon’s attitude with regard to the popular religion speedily became her own; s...

Before her marriage Mrs. Edmund Yule was one of seven motherless sisters who constituted the family of a dentist slenderly provided in the matter of income. The pinching and paring which was a chief e...

Nor would it be true to represent Edwin Reardon as rising to the new day wholly disconsolate. He too had slept unusually well, and with returning consciousness the sense of a burden removed was more i...

It was more than a fortnight after Reardon’s removal to Islington when Jasper Milvain heard for the first time of what had happened. He was coming down from the office of the Will-o’-the-Wisp one afte...

Since the domestic incidents connected with that unpleasant review in The Current, the relations between Alfred Yule and his daughter had suffered a permanent change, though not in a degree noticeable...

Each day Jasper came to inquire of his sisters if they had news from Wattleborough or from Marian Yule. He exhibited no impatience, spoke of the matter in a disinterested tone; still, he came daily. O...

Alfred Yule’s behaviour under his disappointment seemed to prove that even for him the uses of adversity could be sweet. On the day after his return home he displayed a most unwonted mildness in such ...

Occasionally Milvain met his sisters as they came out of church on Sunday morning, and walked home to have dinner with them. He did so today, though the sky was cheerless and a strong northwest wind m...

Refuge from despair is often found in the passion of self-pity and that spirit of obstinate resistance which it engenders. In certain natures the extreme of self-pity is intolerable, and leads to self...

On her return from church that Sunday Mrs. Edmund Yule was anxious to learn the result of the meeting between Amy and her husband. She hoped fervently that Amy’s anomalous position would come to an en...

A touch of congestion in the right lung was a warning to Reardon that his half-year of insufficient food and general waste of strength would make the coming winter a hard time for him, worse probably ...

The rooms which Milvain had taken for himself and his sisters were modest, but more expensive than their old quarters. As the change was on his account he held himself responsible for the extra outlay...

Marian had finished the rough draft of a paper on James Harrington, author of Oceana. Her father went through it by the midnight lamp, and the next morning made his comments. A black sky and sooty rai...

Throughout the day Marian kept her room. Her intention to leave the house was, of course, abandoned; she was the prisoner of fate. Mrs. Yule would have tended her with unremitting devotion, but the gi...

The chances are that you have neither understanding nor sympathy for men such as Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen. They merely provoke you. They seem to you inert, flabby, weakly envious, foolishly obs...

Reardon had never been to Brighton, and of his own accord never would have gone; he was prejudiced against the place because its name has become suggestive of fashionable imbecility and the snobbishne...

On an evening of early summer, six months after the death of Edwin Reardon, Jasper of the facile pen was bending over his desk, writing rapidly by the warm western light which told that sunset was nea...

Marian was at work as usual in the Reading-room. She did her best, during the hours spent here, to convert herself into the literary machine which it was her hope would some day be invented for constr...

Milvain’s skilful efforts notwithstanding, Mr. Bailey, Grocer, had no success. By two publishers the book had been declined; the firm which brought it out offered the author half profits and fifteen p...

Only when he received Miss Rupert’s amiably-worded refusal to become his wife was Jasper aware how firmly he had counted on her accepting him. He told Dora with sincerity that his proposal was a piece...

When the fitting moment arrived, Alfred Yule underwent an operation for cataract, and it was believed at first that the result would be favourable. This hope had but short duration; though the utmost ...