A Quiet Valley EPUB

Excerpt: ""COME, Dulcie! Dulcie, my dear! Not ready yet?" A spice of good-humored impatience breathed through the rich bass tones.

George Rutherford stood in the hall of a somewhat primitive Welsh hotel.

The door opening into a sitting-room, on one side, displayed sundry ladies and gentlemen, occupied or non-occupied in various ways.

The door opening into the kitchen, on the other side, displayed a waiter or two in shirtsleeves, coming and going.

The front door, opening on the hotel grounds, displayed a bare, gravelly space, with shrubs around, a short avenue of trees beyond, and glimpses of distant hills softly outlined against a blue sky.

Mr. Rutherford was a man of perhaps five or six-and-thirty years, unusually tall and massive in make, yet not stout.

Honest brown eyes looked out from beneath a brow of remarkable breadth, which was framed in an abundant growth of tawny hair, fine as silk in texture.

Moustache and beard, of a somewhat darker hue than the hair upon his head, almost hid a mouth of characteristic and beautiful outlines.

He stood at the foot of the staircase, grasping a huge, crook-handled walking stick as tall as himself; and blissfully unconscious of, or indifferent to, the attention he was attracting from the inmates of the drawing-room, while he called again, in tones "not loud, but deep" - "Dulcie, my dear, make haste!""