“A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.”...

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coa...

Elfride Swancourt, a young lady Christopher Swancourt, a clergyman Stephen Smith, an architect Henry Knight, a reviewer and essayist Charlotte Troyton, a rich widow Gertrude Jethway, a poor widow Spen...

Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface. Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of time, was known only to those who watched the circumstances...

When two or three additional hours had merged the same afternoon in evening, some moving outlines might have been observed against the sky on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district. They circ...

That first repast in Endelstow Vicarage was a very agreeable one to young Stephen Smith. The table was spread, as Elfride had suggested to her father, with the materials for the heterogeneous meal cal...

For reasons of his own, Stephen Smith was stirring a short time after dawn the next morning. From the window of his room he could see, first, two bold escarpments sloping down together like the letter...

It was breakfast time. As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of light from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have stereotyped themselves in unrelieved shades of...

Simultaneously with the conclusion of Stephen’s remark, the sound of the closing of an external door in their immediate neighbourhood reached Elfride’s ears. It came from the further side of the wing ...

Stephen Smith revisited Endelstow Vicarage, agreeably to his promise. He had a genuine artistic reason for coming, though no such reason seemed to be required. Six-and-thirty old seat ends, of exquisi...

The mists were creeping out of pools and swamps for their pilgrimages of the night when Stephen came up to the front door of the vicarage. Elfride was standing on the step illuminated by a lemon-hued ...

Oppressed, in spite of themselves, by a foresight of impending complications, Elfride and Stephen returned down the hill hand in hand. At the door they paused wistfully, like children late at school. ...

Stephen retraced his steps towards the cottage he had visited only two or three hours previously. He drew near and under the rich foliage growing about the outskirts of Endelstow Park, the spotty ligh...

Stephen lay watching the Great Bear; Elfride was regarding a monotonous parallelogram of window blind. Neither slept that night. Early the next morning⁠—that is to say, four hours after their stolen i...

The few tattered clouds of the morning enlarged and united, the sun withdrew behind them to emerge no more that day, and the evening drew to a close in drifts of rain. The water-drops beat like duck s...

It is London in October⁠—two months further on in the story. Bede’s Inn has this peculiarity, that it faces, receives from, and discharges into a bustling thoroughfare speaking only of wealth and resp...

It has now to be realized that nearly three-quarters of a year have passed away. In place of the autumnal scenery which formed a setting to the previous enactments, we have the culminating blooms of s...

Though sheer and intelligible griefs are not charmed away by being confided to mere acquaintances, the process is a palliative to certain ill-humours. Among these, perplexed vexation is one⁠—a species...

On a day about three weeks later, the Swancourt trio were sitting quietly in the drawing-room of The Crags, Mrs. Swancourt’s house at Endelstow, chatting, and taking easeful survey of their previous m...

“There is Henry Knight, I declare!” said Mrs. Swancourt one day. They were gazing from the jutting angle of a wild enclosure not far from The Crags, which almost overhung the valley already described ...

The old tower of West Endelstow Church had reached the last weeks of its existence. It was to be replaced by a new one from the designs of Mr. Hewby, the architect who had sent down Stephen. Planks an...

Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s recollection of the speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said b...

Knight turned his back upon the parish of Endelstow, and crossed over to Cork. One day of absence superimposed itself on another, and proportionately weighted his heart. He pushed on to the Lakes of K...

Stephen had said that he should come by way of Bristol, and thence by a steamer to Castle Boterel, in order to avoid the long journey over the hills from St. Launce’s. He did not know of the extension...

Haggard cliffs, of every ugly altitude, are as common as sea-fowl along the line of coast between Exmoor and Land’s End; but this outflanked and encompassed specimen was the ugliest of them all. Their...

By this time Stephen Smith had stepped out upon the quay at Castle Boterel, and breathed his native air. A darker skin, a more pronounced moustache, and an incipient beard, were the chief additions an...

The rain had ceased since the sunset, but it was a cloudy night; and the light of the moon, softened and dispersed by its misty veil, was distributed over the land in pale gray. A dark figure stepped ...

During these days of absence Stephen lived under alternate conditions. Whenever his emotions were active, he was in agony. Whenever he was not in agony, the business in hand had driven out of his mind...

All eyes were turned to the entrance as Stephen spoke, and the ancient-mannered conclave scrutinized him inquiringly. “Why, ’tis our Stephen!” said his father, rising from his seat; and, still retaini...

Love frequently dies of time alone⁠—much more frequently of displacement. With Elfride Swancourt, a powerful reason why the displacement should be successful was that the newcomer was a greater man th...

“Miss Swancourt, it is eleven o’clock.” She was looking out of her dressing-room window on the first floor, and Knight was regarding her from the terrace balustrade, upon which he had been idly sittin...

It is an evening at the beginning of October, and the mellowest of autumn sunsets irradiates London, even to its uttermost eastern end. Between the eye and the flaming West, columns of smoke stand up ...

Elfride clung closer to Knight as day succeeded day. Whatever else might admit of question, there could be no dispute that the allegiance she bore him absorbed her whole soul and existence. A greater ...

One day the reviewer said, “Let us go to the cliffs again, Elfride;” and, without consulting her wishes, he moved as if to start at once. “The cliff of our dreadful adventure?” she inquired, with a sh...

It was now October, and the night air was chill. After looking to see that she was well wrapped up, Knight took her along the hillside path they had ascended so many times in each other’s company, whe...

A habit of Knight’s, when not immediately occupied with Elfride⁠—to walk by himself for half an hour or so between dinner and bedtime⁠—had become familiar to his friends at Endelstow, Elfride herself ...

Sixteen hours had passed. Knight was entering the ladies’ boudoir at The Crags, upon his return from attending the inquest touching the death of Mrs. Jethway. Elfride was not in the apartment. Mrs. Sw...

The scene shifts to Knight’s chambers in Bede’s Inn. It was late in the evening of the day following his departure from Endelstow. A drizzling rain descended upon London, forming a humid and dreary ha...

“I can’t think what’s coming to these St. Launce’s people at all at all.” “With their ‘How-d’ye-do’s,’ do you mean?” “Ay, with their ‘How-d’ye-do’s,’ and shaking of hands, asking me in, and tender inq...

Knight roamed south, under colour of studying Continental antiquities. He paced the lofty aisles of Amiens, loitered by Ardennes Abbey, climbed into the strange towers of Laon, analyzed Noyon and Rhei...

Stephen pondered not a little on this meeting with his old friend and once-beloved exemplar. He was grieved, for amid all the distractions of his latter years a still small voice of fidelity to Knight...

The friends and rivals breakfasted together the next morning. Not a word was said on either side upon the matter discussed the previous evening so glibly and so hollowly. Stephen was absorbed the grea...

Half an hour has passed. Two miserable men are wandering in the darkness up the miles of road from Camelton to Endelstow. “Has she broken her heart?” said Henry Knight. “Can it be that I have killed h...

See Preface. ↩...