Clarence Budington Kelland

“ Then he was driven through the holiday-making streets crowded with a populace in holiday humor to the barrière, and thence into the country. On every building waved an American flag, in every buttonhole was a tiny American flag, and the appearance of an American military automobile was the signal for applause and lifting of hats. Small boys shouted as small boys of all countries shout; friendly old gentlemen waved their canes; young women smiled broadly or demurely, invitingly or shyly. Kendall felt as if he were enjoying some sort of a triumph, as if this celebration were for him. ”

“ A coin no bigger than the nail of one's finger, if it but presented the face of beauty, gave him greater joy than a canvas made immortal by Titian or a statue hewn by the chisel of the demigod Michael Angelo. In every human creature is a store of love: love in desuetude is unthinkable—it must have an object, worthy or unworthy, virtuous or depraved. No woman had nestled into Carnavon's life; religion he rejected; his medals and coins remained, and he loved them for their loveliness. ”

“ When she thought of capital, of moneyed aristocracy in the mass and in the abstract, she hated it. It was a thing to be uprooted, plotted against, reviled. When she met a member of it in the body, and face to face, as she was meeting Bonbright Foote, she could not hate. He was a man, an individual. She could not withhold from him the heart-warming flash of her smile, could not wish him harm. Somehow, in the concrete, he became a part of mankind, and so entitled to happiness. ”

“ The fact of the matter was that in that hour Angus Burke knew his real birth—he began to live.
He thought of Lydia—thrilled joyously as she entered his mind. To this point his musings had been pleasurable. Now, suddenly, he understood that love is a craving, a hunger for a definite individual, a ravenous demand for a supplement to one’s self—a craving which, unsatisfied, fed on itself and was capable of bringing grief or even despair....
Love, he comprehended, was a forerunner of marriage, a moving cause of marriage. It urged on to that end, was Nature’s force which drove mankind to mating. ”

“ Steadily, swiftly it sped to take its place as sentinel at those high gates; to bar the roads of the sky; to ride the clouds a challenger, a champion, a winged guardian, steadfast, courageous, eagerly dauntless....
Potter felt the splendor of it; it uplifted him. Soaring there above the lake, he knew a strange sense of detachment from the fetters of the flesh. He felt, not like a man, liable to weaknesses, ills, death, but like an immortal upon a mission for Olympus. ”

“ One of the delights of Ken’s acquaintance with Andree was that each meeting with her seemed a fresh adventure; there was a sameness about these meetings. Andree always appeared just so, and conducted herself just so. He could foretell with exactitude what her every movement and gesture and word would be when she did appear. But somehow, probably unconsciously, she was able to impart to every rendezvous a freshness, an air of mystery, something elusive and elfin that made them, no matter how often repeated, always alluring, exciting, delightful. ”

“ Carmel asked.
For the first time she saw the man, the real Abner Fownes. Lines, cultivated by years of play-acting in a character part, disappeared from his face. His chins seemed to decrease in number; his cheeks to become less pudgy; his eyes less staring and fatuous. His jaw showed strong and ruthless; his eyes turned cold and deadly and intelligent. She saw in him a man capable of planning, of directing, of commanding other men—a man who would pause before no obstacle, a man whose absurd body was but a convenient disguise for a powerful, sinister personality. ”

“ Not a man of the family, for time beyond which the memory of man runneth not, but had been a whole-souled, single-purposed labor man—trade-union man—extremist—revolutionist. Her father had been killed in a labor riot—and beatified by her. As the men of her family had been, so were the women—so was she.
Rights of man, tyranny of capital, class consciousness had been taught her with her nursery rhymes. She was a zealot. A charming zealot with a soul that laughed and wanted all mankind to be happy with it—a soul that translated itself by her famous grin. ”

“ Carnavon looked again, and the temple was not there, neither was the furtive one, nor the High Priest. All about him stretched the darkness, light-dotted; in the distance, toward the city, the mingled voices of approaching tumult affronted the night. Presently along the road hurried and jostled a throng armed with swords and staves, at their head the furtive stranger of the temple, his black beard sunk on his breast. ”

“ He was flying on a level with Cantor’s machine, approaching it from the rear. Hildegarde saw the blue shape of a revolver in Potter’s hand and bent forward, tense, breathless for the event.
Cantor, unconscious that he did not occupy the heavens alone, sped onward with singleness of purpose. He was unaware of danger, unconscious of near-flying menace. Potter did not want it so. He could not attack a man, an unconscious man, from behind. What he wanted was combat, man to man conflict. Even a spy bent on treacherous mission of destruction he could not destroy without warning. ”

“ Evan Pell got up from his place and went out without a word. Presently she heard Tubal banging about, preparatory to going home, and then she was alone. She did not like the feeling of aloneness. The thing had worn upon her more than she realized, and her nerve ends jangled. She was conscious of a rising discomfort of mind, which resolved itself into apprehension as dusk fell and shadows filtered in to flood the corners of the room with blackness. Her mind persisted in thinking of Sheriff Churchill, of the suddenness, the completeness of his disappearing. ”

“ Lydia tore herself away and stood an instant white as the lace in the window behind her, white except for her lips which burned a curious carmine, and her eyes which blazed with a light which was impossibly green—the green of trapped fury. She stood rigid, immovable, as if turned to ice by her sense of outrage.... Then she seemed to think, to realize, to become a human girl, capable of ordinary human emotions and actions.... ”

“ He was at the place of meeting early and there paced back and forth before the entrance to subterranean Paris, watching the crowds and waiting with impatience. The crowd was an old story to him now, but it never quite lost its fascination, never quite laid aside that air of unreality, of foreignness, of eventfulness that made the Paris throng of those days what it was—foreign in the eyes of the foreigner and foreign in the eyes of the Parisian.... He saw a slender girl—she seemed not more than twenty—bidding farewell to a youthful soldier. ”

“ He had come from the shops but a half hour before; had come from that room where his father lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other shielding his face. There had been no time to think then; no time to realize. ... What thought had come to him was one of wonder that the death of his father could mean so little to him. Shock he felt, but not grief. He had not loved his father. Yet a father is a vital thing in a son's life. Bonbright felt this. He knew that the departing of a father should stand as one of the milestones of life, marking a great change. ”

“ Slow as the ’plane was, compared with those miracles of speed with which the chivalry of the air hold their tournaments in the lists of the sky, it seemed to eliminate time and space. Distances which the swiftest vessel passed laboriously in an hour seemed to withdraw themselves as at a magic word of command. Abreast of the light-ship they passed an up-bound freighter. Its deck seemed a mammoth gridiron as Hildegarde looked down upon it—a gridiron whose cross-bars were battened hatches. ”

“ Andree would be wife and sweetheart, with no thought of dominating, but only of giving, of adding to the happiness of the man she loved.
If love were cruel to Andree, and the man she worshiped unkind, she would fade silently, withdraw into herself, and suffer; Maude would have suffered, but she would have faced the matter and held her own. It would be possible for Maude to go through life alone; that Andree should do so was utterly unthinkable. This was, perhaps, because Andree thought of herself only as a woman, and as a woman whose life must be bound up with the life of some man. ”

“ Such a garment is only to be worn when there is none in all the world to recognize that it is a disguise. Once a single soul lifts the mask and gazes upon the reality lurking within, and the thing is done. Abner Fownes knew Carmel saw him as he was—not by sure knowledge, grounded upon fact, perhaps, but by intuition. ”

“ How little one human being can know as to what life or what incident will touch and mould, will ennoble or crush, the life of another. How could Dave Wilkins guess that the business upon which he was engaged was, in the end, to be of more importance to Lydia Canfield than any other event in her history?... How could he guess that the squalid, the unspeakable past of Angus Burke could be meshed with the glowing future of this child of good fortune?... ”

“ Soon they were beyond the rim of industry which banded the city, and, leaving behind them towering chimneys, smokeless for the night, clouds of released working-men waiting their turns to crowd into overloaded street cars, the grimy, busy belt line which extended in a great arc through the body of the manufacturing strip, they passed through sprouting, mushroomlike suburban villages—villages which had not been there the year before, which would be indistinguishable from the city itself the year after. ”

“ Potter was astonished. He was something more than astonished, he was filled with a thrilling excitement, the excitement that comes to a man when he feels he is standing at the gate of some climax.
Cantor was explaining such erudite matters as the tail-spin, the nose-dive, looping the loop, and how one gave his machine the spurious appearance of fluttering downward out of control—so to deceive an unwary adversary. He was very clear, very positive. No man, thought Potter, could talk like that who was not a master of the air, who had not been a super-skilled pilot.... ”