Read "The House of Whispers" by William le Queux online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Loving and perishing: these have tallied from eternity. Love and death walk hand-in-hand. The will to love means also to be ready for death.
Gabrielle Heyburn recognised this truth. She had the will to love, and she had the resolve to perish -- perish by her own hand -- rather than allow her secret to be exposed. Those who knew her -- a young, athletic, merry-faced, open-air girl on the verge of budding womanhood, so true-hearted, frank, and free -- little dreamed of the terrible nature of that secret within her young heart.