The Inner Shrine

A free download from http://www.dertz.in


The Inner Shrine

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Inner Shrine, by Basil King This
eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Inner Shrine
Author: Basil King
Release Date: December 20, 2004 [EBook #14393]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
INNER SHRINE ***

Produced by Rick Niles, Carol David and the PG Online Distributed
Proofreading Team

THE
INNER

SHRINE
A NOVEL OF TODAY
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER & BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON M.C.M.I.X

Copyright, 1908, 1909, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published May, 1909.
[Transcriber's note: The name of the author, Basil King, does not
appear in the text.]

ILLUSTRATIONS
SHE STOOD WATCHING THE RISE AND DIP OF THE
STEAMER'S BOW (See page 61) Frontispiece THE BANKER TOOK
A LONGER TIME THAN WAS NECESSARY TO SCAN THE
POOR LITTLE LIST Facing p. 46
PRESENTLY ALL FOUR WERE ON THEIR WAY BACK TO THE
DRAWING-ROOM " 78
DIANE PROPPED THE CABLEGRAM IN A CONSPICUOUS
PLACE " 152
"I'VE NO ONE TO SPEAK A WORD FOR ME BUT YOU" " 202
IT WAS WHAT MRS. WAPPINGER CALLED AN "OFF-DAY" "
252
MRS. BAYFORD WAS PURRING TO HER GUESTS " 260

HAVING MADE A COPY OF THIS LETTER, SHE CALLED
SIMMONS AND FULTON AND GAVE THEM THEIR
INSTRUCTIONS " 264
"SINCE THE INNER SHRINE IS UNLOCKED--AT LAST--I'LL GO
IN" " 354

THE INNER SHRINE

THE INNER SHRINE I
Though she had counted the strokes of every hour since midnight, Mrs.
Eveleth had no thought of going to bed. When she was not sitting bolt
upright, indifferent to comfort, in one of the stiff-backed, gilded chairs,
she was limping, with the aid of her cane, up and down the long suite
of salons, listening for the sound of wheels. She knew that George and
Diane would be surprised to find her waiting up for them, and that they
might even be annoyed; but in her state of dread it was impossible to
yield to small considerations.
She could hardly tell how this presentiment of disaster had taken hold
upon her, for the beginning of it must have come as imperceptibly as
the first flicker of dusk across the radiance of an afternoon. Looking
back, she could almost make herself believe that she had seen its
shadow over her early satisfaction in her son's marriage to Diane.
Certainly she had felt it there before their honeymoon was over. The
four years that had passed since then had been spent--or, at least, she
would have said so now--in waiting for the peril to present itself.
And yet, had she been called on to explain why she saw it stalking
through the darkness of this particular June night, she would have
found it difficult to give coherent statement to her fear. Everything
about her was pursuing its normally restless round, with scarcely a hint
of the exceptional. If life in Paris was working up again to that feverish
climax in which the season dies, it was only what she had witnessed

every year since the last days of the Second Empire. If Diane's gayety
was that of excitement rather than of youth, if George's depression was
that of jaded effort rather than of satiated pleasure, it was no more than
she had seen in them at other times. She acknowledged that she had
few facts to go upon--that she had indeed little more than the terrified
prescience which warns the animal of a storm.
There were moments of her vigil when she tried to reassure herself with
the very tenuity of her reasons for alarm. It was a comfort to think how
little there was that she could state with the definiteness of knowledge.
In all that met the eye George's relation to Diane was not less happy
than in the first days of their life together. If, on Diane's part, the
spontaneity of wedded love had gradually become the adroitness of
domestic tact, there was nothing to affirm it but Mrs. Eveleth's own
power of divination. If George submitted with a blinder obedience than
ever to each new extravagance of Diane's Parisian caprice, there was
nothing to show that he lived beyond his means but Mrs. Eveleth's
maternal apprehension. His income was undoubtedly large, and, for all
she knew, it justified the sumptuous style Diane and he kept up. Where
the purchasing power of money began and ended was something she
had never known. Disorder was so frequent in her own affairs