Project Gutenberg's The Uttermost Farthing, by Marie Belloc Lowndes

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Title: The Uttermost Farthing

Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes

Release Date: July 28, 2006 [EBook #18927]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE UTTERMOST FARTHING

BY MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

1910

COLLECTION OF BRITISH AUTHORS
_COPYRIGHT EDITION_
VOL. 4174.
LEIPZIG: BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ.
PARIS: LIBRAIRIE H. GAULON & CIE, 39, RUE MADAME.
PARIS: THE GALIGNANI LIBRARY, 224, RUE DE RIVOLI, AND AT NICE, 8, AVENUE
MASSENA.

"Thou shalt by no means come out thence till thou hast paid the
uttermost farthing."

I.

Laurence Vanderlyn, unpaid attache at the American Embassy in Paris,
strode down the long grey platform marked No. 5, of the Gare de Lyon. It
was seven o'clock, the hour at which Paris is dining or is about to
dine, and the huge station was almost deserted.

The train de luxe had gone more than an hour ago, the Riviera rapide
would not start till ten, but one of those trains bound for the South,
curiously named demi-rapides, was timed to leave in twenty minutes.

Foreigners, especially Englishmen and Americans, avoid these trains, and
this was why Laurence Vanderlyn had chosen it as the starting point of
what was to be a great adventure, an adventure which must for ever be
concealed, obliterated as much as may be from his own memory--do not men
babble in delirium?--once life had again become the rather grey thing he
had found it to be.

In the domain of the emotions it is the unexpected which generally
happens, and now it was not only the unexpected but the incredible which
had happened to this American diplomatist. He and Margaret Pargeter, the
Englishwoman whom he had loved with an absorbing, unsatisfied passion,
and an ever-increasing concentration and selfless devotion, for seven
years, were about to do that which each had sworn, together and
separately, should never