A STUDY IN SHADOWS
By William J. Locke
London: John Lane
MCMVIII
CONTENTS
CHAPTER IV.—“WHERE THE BROOK AND RIVER MEET.”
CHAPTER V.—THE PUZZLE OF RAINE CHETWYND.
CHAPTER VIII.—A POOR LITTLE TRAGEDY.
CHAPTER IX.—VARIOUS ELEMENTS HAVE THEIR SAY.
CHAPTER XI.—“THE WOMAN WHO DELIBERATES.”
CHAPTER XII.—ELECTRICITY IN THE AIR.
CHAPTER XIII.—THE SOILING OF A PAGE.
CHAPTER XV.—THE SIGNING OF A DEATH WARRANT.
CHAPTER I.—THE LONE WOMEN.
Felicia Graves was puzzled. The six weeks she had spent at the Pension Boccard had confused many of her conceptions and brought things before her judgment for which her standards were inadequate. Not that a girl who had passed the few years of her young womanhood in the bubbling life of a garrison town could be as unsophisticated as village innocence in the play; but her fresh, virginal experience had been limited to what was seemly, orthodox, and comfortable. She was shrewd enough in the appreciation of superficial vanities, rightly esteeming their value as permanent elements; but the baser follies of human nature had not been reached by her young eyes. Her whole philosophy of life had been bound up in well-ordered family systems, in which the men were honest and well-bred, and the women either comfortable matrons or fresh-minded, companionable girls like herself. She knew vaguely that sorrows and bitterness and broken lives existed in the world, but hitherto she had never reckoned upon coming into contact with them. They all lay in the dim sphere where crime and immorality held sway, whose i