We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Th.
Woman in White
(Gem)
By JOHN OLDEN
From the Photoplay of George Edwardes Hall, being an adaptation from the famous novel by Wilkie Collins
KV*
ON a moonlit, sultry night of July, in the year of 1850, Walter Hartridge, drawing-master, was returning along the highroad from his mother's cottage in Hampstead to his rooms in London. This pedestrian jaunt had become his invariable custom at the end of his weekly visit in the suburb. He was big, overflowing with health, and, if need be, fleet of foot — qualities which, no doubt, had carried him thru the lonely, hedgebordered road, as yet, unmolested.
On this breathless night, with its searching moon overhead, he had little to fear. He hummed a merry tune, in defiance of the hedgerow, as his long legs measured the road. Coming to where the Finchley road crossed his own, he hesitated a moment. In that moment the touch of a light hand upon his shoulder caused him to tremble, as if he had been struck.
A cloud had come over the moon, but in the shrouded light he turned to make out the figure and fragile features of a woman dressed from head to foot in white. She inquired of him the road to London, and, with a sigh, passed on.
Hartridge was too taken back by the soft suddenness of her appearance from behind him, her almost unearthly frailty, and the strangeness of
49
a young woman, alone, on the Hampstead road, to follow, or offer her protection. She passed from his sight almost as suddenly as she had come.
Dawn of the following day found the drawing-master out of bed and eagerly packing his clothes and artists' materials. He had accepted the offer, by correspondence, of Mr. Frederick Fairlie, of Limmeridge House, Cumberland, to take charge of his priceless collection of etchings, and to instruct his nieces in watercolor painting. Hartridge had never met Mr. Fairlie — he had heard of him merely as an eccentric recluse in his big house on the Cumberland coast, but the salary was excellent, the life was mostly outdoors, and Hartridge was heartily tired of the heat of a London summer.
Thus it was that the monotony of the long railway journey was broken by the anticipation of these things, and the strange incident of the previous night quite crowded out of the young man's head.
On Hartridge 's arrival at Limmeridge House, in the late afternoon, the peculiar character of its owner was manifested thru the announcement of his valet that Mr. Fairlie would be unable to receive Mr. Hartridge until the following morning. The elder of the nieces, Miss