Roland Yorke: A Sequel to "The Channings"Wood, Henry, Mrs.
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Roland Yorke: A Sequel to "The Channings"
Wood, Henry, Mrs.
Detective and mystery stories; English fiction -- 19th century
Gerald Yorke was another who had taken holiday. Gerald had managed to
get an invitation to cruise in the Honourable Mr. Fuller's yacht; and
Gerald, with two or three other invited guests, went careering off in
it for the space of six weeks. Before starting, he had fully
accomplished his reviewing work with regard to Hamish Channing's
book--but that can be left until later. Gerald enjoyed himself
amazingly. The yacht put into foreign ports on occasion, and they got
a few days' land cruise. The honourable owner treated his friends
right royally, and Gerald had not felt so much at ease since he was a
boy. By a slice of luck, which Gerald hardly believed in at the time,
he had induced Vincent Yorke to lend him fifty pounds before starting,
and he thought himself laudably generous in dividing this with his
wife.
"Now mind, Winny," he said to her on the morning of his departure, "I
shall be away about five weeks. It can't take you five pounds a week
to live and pay rent, so I shall expect you to have a good sum in hand
when I get back. I'll drop you a letter now and then, but you'll not
be able to write to me, as we shall be moving about from place to
place just as the wind or mood takes us."
Therefore, on the score of his wife and children, Gerald was entirely
at ease; and he quite expected, after his charge to Winny, that she
would have something like eight or ten pounds left of the twenty-five;
at least, that she ought to have. He was out of reach of creditors
too; the future he did not allow to trouble him (he never did), and
Gerald gave himself wholly up to the enjoyment of the present.
Little did Gerald Yorke suspect, as he leaned over the side of the
yacht in seductive indolence, smoking his cigar and sipping his iced
Burgundy, that poor Winny's money had come to an end before the second
week was over. It might not have cost him a single moment's care if he
had known it, for Gerald was one upon whom no earthly person's trouble
made the smallest impression, unless it touched him personally.
Effectually out of the way himself, Winny might just have done as she
best could. Gerald would have wished he was at hand to tell her she
deserved a shaking for her folly, and dismissed the matter from his
mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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