E-text prepared by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Cathy Smith, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
A Novel
By
Victoria Cross
1908
By Victoria Cross
Five Nights
Life's Shop Window
Anna Lombard
Six Women
Six Chapters of a Man's Life
The Woman Who Didn't
To-morrow?
Paula
A Girl of the Klondike
The Religion of Evelyn Hastings
Life of my Heart
The Gold Night
The Violet Night
The Black Night
The Crimson Night
The White Night
"The nights have different colours. Some nights are black, the nights of storm: some are electric blue, some are silver, the moon-filled nights: some are red under the hot planet Mars or the fierce harvest moon. Some are white, the white nights of the Arctic winter: but this was a violet night, a hot, mysterious, violet night of Midsummer."
As one looks over any period of one's life, it appears behind one asa shining maze of brilliant colour with spots in it here and there ofbrighter or darker hue. Each spot represents a period of time when ourhappiness has glowed brighter or waned; sometimes it is a day, moreoften it is a night. Looking back now, over a stretch of my existenceI see many such spots gleaming brightly; they are nights of colour.The history of many of these is too sacred to be written, but thereare Five Nights, which, though not the dearest to my memory, have yetstamped themselves and their colour on it for ever. And the record ofthese five nights is contained in the following pages.
It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to thedeck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morningin Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for inthis far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizonat midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed inlimpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing toits full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.
Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and wewere steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by