The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Paliser case, by Edgar Saltus

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Title: The Paliser case

Author: Edgar Saltus

Release Date: August 29, 2009 [EBook #29847]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PALISER CASE

BY EDGAR SALTUS

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
NEW YORK 1919

COPYRIGHT, 1919,
BY EDGAR SALTUS

_Printed in the U. S. A._

_Then headlong down the stair of life he fell, while up
that stairway others laughed and mounted and all were
drunken with the wine of youth._

THE PALISER CASE

I

The murder of Monty Paliser, headlined that morning in the papers, shook
the metropolis at breakfast, buttered the toast, improved the taste of
the coffee.

Murdered! It seemed too bad to be false. Moreover, there was his
picture, the portrait of a young man obviously high-bred and insolently
good-looking. In addition to war news and the financial page, what more
could you decently ask for a penny? Nothing, perhaps, except the address
of the murderer. But that detail, which the morning papers omitted,
extras shortly supplied. Meanwhile in the minds of imaginative New
Yorkers, visions of the infernal feminine surged. The murdered man's
name was evocative.

His father, Montagu Paliser, generally known as M. P., had lived in that
extensive manner in which New York formerly took an indignant delight.
Behind him, extending back to the remotest past when Bowling Green was
the centre of fashion, always there had been a Paliser, precisely as
there has always been a Livingston. These people and a dozen others
formed the landed gentry--a gentry otherwise landed since. But not the
Paliser clan. The original Paliser was very wealthy. All told he had a
thousand dollars. Montagu Paliser, the murdered man's father, had stated
casually, as though offering unimportant information, that, by