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The Project Gutenberg eBook, Five Nights, by Victoria Cross

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Title: Five Nights
Author: Victoria Cross
Release Date: July 24, 2004 [eBook #13017]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FIVE NIGHTS***
E-text prepared by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Cathy Smith, and Project
Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

FIVE NIGHTS
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
CONTENTS
PART I
The Gold Night
I THE TAKU INLET
II THE TEA-SHOP
III IN THE WOOD
PART II
The Violet Night
IV AT THE STUDIO
V THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO
PART III
The Black Night
VI IN MAYFAIR
VII FREEDOM
PART IV
The Crimson Night
VIII LOSS
IX IN 'FRISCO
X IN THE SHADOW OF THE VOLCANO
XI THE WAY OF THE GODS
PART V
The White Night
XII THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACE
FIVE NIGHTS

"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."

_LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW_.
INTRODUCTION

As one looks over any period of one's life, it appears behind one as
a shining maze of brilliant colour with spots in it here and there of
brighter or darker hue. Each spot represents a period of time when our
happiness has glowed brighter or waned; sometimes it is a day, more
often it is a night. Looking back now, over a stretch of my existence
I see many such spots gleaming brightly; they are nights of colour.
The history of many of these is too sacred to be written, but there
are Five Nights, which, though not the dearest to my memory, have yet
stamped themselves and their colour on it for ever. And the record of
these five nights is contained in the following pages.

TREVOR LONSDALE.
PART ONE
THE GOLD NIGHT
CHAPTER I
THE TAKU INLET

It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to the
deck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning
in Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for in
this far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizon
at midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in
limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing to
its full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.

Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and we
were steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by great
glittering blocks of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by
on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the colouring of sea and
sky! Both were so vividly blue, the note of each so deep, so intense,
one seemed almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the vessel's
side, then made my way forward and stood there; I, the lover of the
East, dazzled by the beauty of the North! The marvellous picture
before me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold, and white.

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