The Beckoning Hand and Other Stories - The Original Classic Edition. Allen Grant

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      THE BECKONING HAND ETC.

       STORIES BY GRANT ALLEN. STRANGE STORIES.

       Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with a Frontispiece by George Du Maurier, 6s.; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s. "Mr. Grant Allen has fully established his claim to be heard henceforth as a story-teller."--Academy.

       "No one will be able to say that the stories are dull. The lighter stories can be read with pleasure by everybody, and the book can be dipped into anywhere without disappointment. One and all, the stories are told with a delightful ease and with an abundance of lively humour."--Athenaeum.

       "Almost all the stories are good, coming nearer to the weird power of Poe than any that we remember to have seen."--Pall Mall

       Gazette.

       "Perhaps the best fiction of the year is 'Strange Stories.' Mr. Grant Allen certainly took his friends by surprise when he burst forth as the author of the stories which had appeared under the signature of J. Arbuthnot Wilson. He was known to us all as one of the most able of the rising men of the evolution school, his contributions to modern science being of considerable value. Few suspected him of such levity as telling light stories. The volume is distinctly good."--County Gentleman.

       PHILISTIA.

       Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 3s. 6d.; post 8vo, illustrated boards, 2s.

       "A very clever, well-written novel, full of freshness and originality."--St. James's Gazette. "A book displaying considerable cleverness.... Very readable and clever."--Academy. "'Philistia' is distinctly clever, and much may be learned from its perusal."--Morning Post. BABYLON.

       Crown 8vo, cloth extra, with twelve Illustrations by P. Macnab, 3s. 6d.

       "The book justifies itself amply. It is fresh, entertaining, and pleasant from beginning to end. The author has kept in check his peculiar power of weird and fantastic realism, but he has proved himself equally at home in the observation of commonplace character, and the reproduction of everyday life."--Pall Mall Gazette.

       "Very bright and very amusing.... That it stands far above the average of contemporary fiction goes without saying."--Spectator. FOR MAIMIE'S SAKE.

       Crown 8vo, cloth extra, 6s.

       "'For Maimie's Sake' is a book that every one who has made acquaintance with the stories signed by 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson' will naturally take up with pleasure. Pleasurable anticipation soon becomes interest, and this interest must rapidly grow into absorbed attention. The humour throughout the first part of Mr. Allen's story is delightful. The reader falls in love with laughing, lovely, un-conventional Maimie."--Academy.

       "This is a very remarkable book. Maimie is essentially human, intensely womanly, and there is something so bewitching in her child-

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       ish ignorance, something so innocent in her wickedness, that we can understand her friends' and her lovers' infatuation for her.... There is power of a very high order in writing which can so consistently, yet without the smallest effort, concentrate the reader's attention on the sinner as apart from the sin. There is not a character in the book which fails to interest us, and the writing is, of its kind, faultless."--Time.

       IN ALL SHADES.

       3 vols, crown 8vo, cloth extra, 31s. 6d.

       "Mr. Grant Allen could not write a dull story if he wished to do so.... The plot is capitally developed. There is one extremely fine character, Louis Delgado, who stirs up the negroes to revolt; and there is a scene where an attack is made by the negroes on a planter's home, which, for dramatic force, has rarely been equalled of late in fiction. The novel has, in addition to excellence of plot and situation, all the charm that comes of bright and easy dialogue and of character-drawing far above what is ordinarily found. In short, the novel is one to delight every one of good taste."--Scotsman.

       "Nora Dupuy is a true, brave, eminently lovable woman, and stands out in the pages of 'In all Shades' as an eminently charming as well as characteristic figure.... On the whole, this is a story of unusual excellence."--Pall Mall Gazette.

       LONDON: CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY.

       "I'M SO GLAD YOU BROUGHT NELLIE HOLT A FLOWER." See p. 134.

       THE BECKONING HAND AND OTHER STORIES

       BY

       GRANT ALLEN

       AUTHOR OF "STRANGE STORIES," "IN ALL SHADES," "PHILISTIA," ETC. WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY TOWNLEY GREEN

       London

       CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

       1887

       PREFACE.

       Of the thirteen stories included in this volume, "The Gold Wulfric," "The Two Carnegies," and "John Cann's Treasure" originally appeared in the pages of the Cornhill; "The Third Time" and "The Search Party's Find" are from Longman's Magazine; "Harry's Inheritance" first saw the light in the English Illustrated; and "Lucretia," "My Uncle's Will," "Olga Davidoff 's Husband," "Isaline and I," "Professor Milliter's Dilemma," and "In Strict Confidence," obtained hospitable shelter between the friendly covers of Belgravia. My title-piece, "The Beckoning Hand," is practically new, having only been published before as the Christmas supplement of a provincial newspaper. My thanks are due to Messrs. Smith and Elder, Longmans, Macmillan, and Chatto and Windus for kind permission to reprint most of the stories here. If anybody reads them and likes them, let me take this opportunity (as an unprejudiced person) of recommending to him my other volume of "Strange Stories," which I consider every bit as gruesome as this one. Should I succeed in attaining the pious ambition of the Fat Boy, and "making your flesh creep," then, as somebody once remarked before, "this work will not have been written in vain."

       G. A.

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       The Nook, Dorking, Christmas Day, 1886. CONTENTS.

       The Beckoning Hand

       Lucretia

       The Third Time The Gold Wulfric My Uncle's Will

       The Two Carnegies

       Olga Davidoff 's Husband John Cann's Treasure Isaline and I

       Professor Milliter's Dilemma

       In Strict Confidence The Search Party's Find Harry's Inheritance

       [Pg 1]

       THE BECKONING HAND. I.

       I first met Cesarine Vivian in the stalls at the Ambiguities Theatre.

       I had promised to take Mrs. Latham and Irene to see the French plays which were then being acted by Marie Leroux's celebrated Palais Royal company. I wasn't at the time exactly engaged to poor Irene: it has always been a comfort to me that I wasn't engaged to her, though I knew Irene herself considered it practically equivalent to an understood engagement. We had known one another

       intimately from childhood upward, for the Lathams were a sort of second cousins of ours, three times removed: and we had always called one another by our Christian names, and been very fond of one another in a simple girlish and boyish fashion as long as we could either of us remember. Still, I maintain, there was no definite understanding between us; and if Mrs. Latham thought I had been paying Irene attentions, she must have known that a young man of two and twenty, with a decent fortune and a nice estate down in Devonshire, was likely to look about him for a while before he thought of settling down and marrying quietly.

       I had brought the yacht up to London Bridge, and was living on board in picnic style, and running about town[Pg 2] casually, when I took Irene and her mother to see "Faustine," at the Ambiguities. As soon as we had got in and taken our places, Irene whispered to me, touching my hand lightly with her fan, "Just look at the very dark girl on the other side of you, Harry! Did you ever in your life see anybody so perfectly beautiful?"

       It has always been a great comfort to me, too, that Irene herself was the first person to call my attention to Cesarine Vivian's extraordinary beauty.

       I turned round, as if by accident, and gave a passing glance, where Irene waved her fan, at the girl beside me. She was beautiful, certainly, in a terrible, grand, statuesque style of beauty; and I saw at a glimpse that she had Southern blood in her veins, perhaps Negro, perhaps