Excerpt from The Next Corner It was on the tulle gown that Elsie's gaze fixed itself. She remembered what a recklessly happy heart it had covered all through the night of mad frivolity, and with what shaking hands - after reading the telegram - she had managed to unhook it only a few hours before. In its grotesque humanness it suddenly seemed to be herself, stretched over there in abandoned grief. Her arm shot up to her eyes and for a few seconds stayed rigid, her teeth sunk into her underlip. "Oh, well!" came from her with smothered desperation. She squirmed from the bedclothes and went to the window. On her journey across the big room she picked up the telegram. When she had opened the persiennes a little, she spread out the paper to read again the words she knew by heart: "Instead of going on with Cranston I am already on my way to France to pick you up there.

Bully that we can, after all, go home together. I won't be able to get to you before Friday evening. By going on the night train to Havre we can get Saturday's ship, which I think is scheduled to start early. Feeling tiptop, and hope you are. Looking forward with much happiness to seeing you "Robert." She went over this twice and standing there, dreaming, the light on her face, she visualized the future she was returning to by the past from which, nearly three years before, she had escaped. The picture of her childhood was a muddled thing, like a spoiled wash drawing where people were ghosts. Of her father, who had died when she was a baby, she had no memory at all.

She had grown up, the only child of Nina Race. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.