Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 edition. Excerpt:...Marchant dwelling. Carriage approach there was none. The Marchant girls' cheap satin slippers had to trip down that gravel path, in fine weather or foul, when they went to a party, and the poor little feet inside the slippers had to dance away any feeling of chill and dampness which the sodden gravel might occasion. Vansittart looked about him in the evening grey as he waited for the opening of the door. He had rung a bell that sounded twice too loud VOL. 1. L for the size of the house, and had set up much barking of indoor and outdoor dogs. There were two long strips of grass sloping down to the holly-hedge that shut off the road, and a long flower border on either side of the gravel path. This was the garden, so far as ornamental garden went, but beyond the grass strip on one side of the house there were cabbage rows, and the usual features of a vegetable garden. Beyond, right and left, stretched meadow-land, away to the dark background of copse and hillside. The house, even after all its improvements, had a humble and homely aspect; walls roughly plastered, small square lattice windows, and that steep slant of the roof, which Vansittart could have touched with his hand. The porch was a roughly built square block, with a sloping thatch, and two little windows, right and left. An old woman, in a blue stuff gown and white cap and apron, opened the door, and even as it opened Vansittart heard again that ripple of silver-clear laughter which he had heard on the hilltop in the snowy night, nearly ten days ago. Ten days. Only ten! Until ten days ago he had lived in happy ignorance that there was such a woman as Eve Marchant in the world. It seemed to him now as strange not to have known of her as it would be not to know of her namesake--the...