The Project Gutenberg EBook of Franklin Kane, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

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.org

Title: Franklin Kane

Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Release Date: July 22, 2006 [EBook #18886]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRANKLIN KANE ***

Produced by Louise Pryor, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration: 'My dear Mr. Kane, I do congratulate you,' Helen said.]

FRANKLIN

KANE

BY

ANNE DOUGLAS

SEDGWICK

(MRS. BASIL DE SELINCOURT)

T. NELSON & SONS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
PARIS: 189, rue Saint-Jacques
LEIPZIG: 35-37 Koenigstrasse

FRANKLIN KANE.

CHAPTER I.

Miss Althea Jakes was tired after her long journey from Basle. It was a
brilliant summer afternoon, and though the shutters were half closed on
the beating Parisian sunlight, the hotel sitting-room looked, in its
brightness, hardly shadowed. Unpinning her hat, laying it on the table
beside her, passing her hands over the undisordered folds of her hair,
Miss Jakes looked about her at the old-gold brocade of the furniture,
the many mirrors in ornate gold frames, the photographs from Bougereau,
the long, crisp lace curtains. It was the same sitting-room that she had
had last year, the same that she had had the year before last--the same,
indeed, to which she had been conducted on her first stay at the Hotel
Talleyrand, eight years ago. The brocade looked as new, the gilded
frames as glittering, the lace curtains as snowy as ever. Everything was
as she had always seen it, from the ugly Satsuma vases flanking the ugly
bronze clock on the mantelpiece, to the sheaf of pink roses lying beside
her in their white paper wrappings. Even Miss Harriet Robinson's choice
of welcoming flowers was the same. So it had always been, and so, no
doubt, it would continue to be for many years to come; and she, no
doubt, for many summers, would arrive from Basle to sit, jadedly,
looking at it.

Amelie, her maid, was unpacking in the next room; the door was ajar, and
Miss Jakes could hear the creaking of lifted trays and the rustling of
multitudinous tissue-paper layers. The sou