Read "The Stronger Influence" by Ethel Mills online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Sleep was long in coming to Esme that night.
She lay in the little bed in the room where, as a girl, she had slept soundly in the untroubled days before love had entered into her life, lay wide-eyed in the hot stillness, with the heavy scent of the oleander stealing into the room, perfuming the night, filling the little garden and the surrounding air with its sweetness, bringing back with its familiar fragrance a rush of memories, shy sweet memories of the days when Paul was her lover and she slept with his letters beneath her pillow and sometimes dreamed of him.