The Hermit Of ——— Street: 1898

By Anna Katharine Green

Anna Katharine Green was one of the earliest detective fiction writers, and some of her mysteries remain the most popular to be written by an American.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krill Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781518368745

Anna Katharine Green

Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) was an American writer and prominent figure in the detective genre. Born in New York City, Green developed an affinity for literature at an early age. She studied at Ripley Female College in Vermont and was mentored by poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of Green’s best-known works is The Leavenworth Case, which was published in 1878. It was a critical and commercial success that made her one of the leading voices in literature. Over the course of her career, Green would go on to write nearly 40 books.

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THE HERMIT OF ——— STREET: 1898

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Anna Katharine Green

CLUE PUBLISHING

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Copyright © 2016 by Anna Katharine Green

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. I COMMIT AN INDISCRETION.

CHAPTER II. A STRANGE WEDDING BREAKFAST.

CHAPTER III. ONE BEAD FROM A NECKLACE.

CHAPTER IV. I LEARN HYPOCRISY.

CHAPTER V. THE STOLEN KEY.

CHAPTER VI. WHILE OTHERS DANCED.

The Hermit Of ——— Street: 1898

By

Anna Katharine Green

The Hermit Of ——— Street: 1898

Published by Clue Publishing

New York City, NY

First published circa 1935

Copyright © Clue Publishing, 2015

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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CHAPTER I. I COMMIT AN INDISCRETION.

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I SHOULD HAVE KEPT MY eyes for the many brilliant and interesting sights constantly offered me. Another girl would have done so. I myself might have done so, had I been over eighteen, or, had I not come from the country, where my natural love of romance had been fostered by uncongenial surroundings and a repressed life under the eyes of a severe and unsympathetic maiden aunt.

I was visiting in a house where fashionable people made life a perpetual holiday. Yet of all the pleasures which followed so rapidly, one upon another, that I have difficulty now in separating them into distinct impressions, the greatest, the only one I never confounded with any other, was the hour I spent in my window after the day’s dissipations were all over, watching—what? Truth and the necessities of my story oblige me to say—a man’s face, a man’s handsome but preoccupied face, bending night after night over a study-table in the lower room of the great house in our rear.

I had been in the city three weeks, and I had already received—pardon the seeming egotism of the confession—four offers, which, considering I had no fortune and but little education or knowledge of the great world, speaks well for something: I leave you to judge what. All of these offers were from young men; one of them from a very desirable young man, but I had listened to no one’s addresses, because, after accepting them, I should have felt it wrong to contemplate so unremittingly the face, which, for all its unconsciousness of myself, held me spell-bound to an idea I neither stopped nor cared to analyze.

Why, at such a distance and under circumstances of such distraction, did it affect me so? It was not a young face (Mr. Allison at that time was thirty-five); neither was it a cheerful or even a satisfied one; but it was very handsome, as I have said; far too handsome, indeed, for a romantic girl to see unmoved, and it was an enigmatic face; one that did not lend itself to immediate comprehension, and that, to one of my temperament, was a fatal attraction, especially as enough was known of his more than peculiar habits to assure me that character, rather than whim, lay back of his eccentricities.

But first let me explain more fully my exact position in regard to this gentleman on that day in early spring, destined to be such a memorable one in my history.

I had never seen him, save in the surreptitious way I have related, and