Mary Gray

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Mary Gray, by Katharine Tynan

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Title: Mary Gray
Author: Katharine Tynan
Release Date: December 27, 2006 [EBook #20201]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY GRAY ***

Produced by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.)

MARY GRAY
BY KATHARINE TYNAN
Author of "Julia," "The Story of Bawn," "Her Ladyship," "For Maisie," etc., etc.
WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. H. TAFFS
[Transcriber's note: This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project. Only the Frontispiece was included in the scans.]
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED London, Paris, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 1909 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[Illustration: "The men would salute their old General, the General salute his old regiment"]

CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
Wistaria Terrace
CHAPTER II.
The Wall Between
CHAPTER III.
The New Estate
CHAPTER IV.
Boy and Girl
CHAPTER V.
"Old Blood and Thunder"
CHAPTER VI.
The Blue Ribbon
CHAPTER VII.
A Chance Meeting
CHAPTER VIII.
Groves of Academe
CHAPTER IX.
The Race with Death
CHAPTER X.
Dispossessed
CHAPTER XI.
The Lion
CHAPTER XII.
Her Ladyship
CHAPTER XIII.
The Heart of a Father
CHAPTER XIV.
Lovers' Parting
CHAPTER XV.
The General has an Idea
CHAPTER XVI.
The Leading and the Light
CHAPTER XVII.
A Night of Spring
CHAPTER XVIII.
Halcyon Weather
CHAPTER XIX.
Wild Thyme and Violets
CHAPTER XX.
Jealousy, Cruel as the Grave
CHAPTER XXI.
Two Women
CHAPTER XXII.
Light on the Way
CHAPTER XXIII.
The News in the Westminster
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Friend
CHAPTER XXV.
The One Woman
CHAPTER XXVI.
Golden Days
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Intermediary
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Noel! Noel!

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"The men would salute their old General, the General salute his old regiment"
"Sir Robin Drummond had come to Mary's side, and turned the page of her music"
"'Do you know what I came here in the mind to ask you?'"
"'Miss Nelly is in the drawing-room, sir'"

MARY GRAY
CHAPTER I
WISTARIA TERRACE
The house where Mary Gray was born and grew towards womanhood was one of a squat line of mean little houses that hid themselves behind a great church. The roadway in front of the houses led only to the back entrance of the church. Over against the windows was the playground of the church schools, surrounded by a high wall that shut away field and sky from the front rooms of Wistaria Terrace.
The houses were drab and ugly, with untidy grass-plots in front. They presented an exterior of three windows and a narrow round-topped hall-door which was a confession of poverty in itself. Five out of six houses had a ramping plaster horse in the fanlight of the hall door, a fixture which went with the house and was immune from breakage because no one ever thought of cleaning the fanlights.
In the back gardens the family wash was put to dry. Some of the more enterprising inhabitants kept fowls; but there was not much enterprise in Wistaria Terrace.
Earlier inhabitants had planted the gardens with lilac and laburnum bushes, with gooseberries and currants. There were no flowers there that did not sow themselves year after year. They were damp, grubby places, but even there an imaginative child like Mary Gray could find suggestions of delight.
Mary's father, Walter Gray, was employed at a watchmaker's of repute. He spent all his working life with a magnifying glass in his eye, peering into the mechanism of watches, adjusting the delicate pivots and springs on which their lives moved. His occupation had perhaps encouraged in him a habit of introspection. Perhaps he found the human machine as worthy of interest as the works of watches and clocks. Anyhow, in his leisure moments, which were few, he would discuss curiously with Mary the hidden springs that kept the human machine in motion, the strange workings and convolutions of it. From the very early age when she began to be a comfort and a companion to her father, Mary had been accustomed to such speculations as would have written Walter Gray down a madman if he had shared them with the grown people about him rather than with a child.
Mary was the child of his romance, of his first marriage, which had lasted barely a year.
He never talked of her mother, even to Mary, though she had vague memories of a time when he had not been so reticent. That was before the stepmother came, the stepmother whom, honestly, Walter Gray had married because his child was neglected. He had not anticipated, perhaps, the long string of children which was to result from the marriage, whose presence in the world was to make Mary's lot a more strenuous one than would have been the case if she had been a child alone.
Not that Mary grumbled about the stepbrothers and sisters. Year after year, from the time she could