The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Combined Maze, by May Sinclair

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Combined Maze

Author: May Sinclair

Release Date: March 31, 2009 [EBook #28461]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMBINED MAZE ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE COMBINED MAZE

BY MAY SINCLAIR

AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE FIRE"

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1913

[Illustration: SHE CLOSED HER EYES, AND HIS HOLD TIGHTENED]

THE COMBINED MAZE

CHAPTER I

You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from
the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner
of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop
in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore
Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively
inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John Randall, a draper.

They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ransome, and Ranny for short.

Ranny should have been born in lands of adventure, under the green light
of a virgin forest, or on some illimitable prairie; he should have
sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or, better
still, he should have run, half-naked, splendidly pagan, bearing the
torch of Marathon.

And yet he bore his torch.

From the very first his mother said that Ranny was that venturesome. He
showed it in his ill-considered and ungovernable determination to be
born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny or his mother, more
nearly died of it. She must have been aware that there was a hitch
somewhere; for, referring again and again, as she did, to Ranny's
venturesomeness, she would say, "It beats me where he gets it from."

He may have got some of it from her, for she, poor thing, had sunk,
adventurously, in one disastrous marriage her whole stock