The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Side Of The Angels, by Basil King

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Title: The Side Of The Angels
A Novel

Author: Basil King

Illustrator: Elizabeth Shippen Grimm

Release Date: October 20, 2009 [EBook #30301]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Side of the Angels

A Novel

By BASIL KING

Author of "The Way Home," Etc.

With Frontispiece
By ELIZABETH SHIPPEN GREEN

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers

The Side of the Angels

Copyright, 1915, 1916, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published February, 1916

[Illustration: "I'M CLAUDE. DON'T YOU REMEMBER ME?"]

THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS

"_My lord, I am on the side of the angels._"--DISRAELI.

CHAPTER I

The difficulty was, in the first place, one of date--not the date of a
month or a year, but of a generation or a century. Had Thorley Masterman
found himself in love with Rosie Fay in 1760, or even in 1860, there
would have been little to adjust and nothing to gainsay. In 1860 the
Fays were still as good as the Thorleys, and almost as good as the
Mastermans. Going back as far as 1760, the Fays might have been
considered better than the Thorleys had the village acknowledged
standards of comparison, while there were no Mastermans at all. That is,
in 1760 the Mastermans still kept their status as yeomen, clergymen, and
country doctors among the hills of Derbyshire, untroubled as yet by that
spirit of unrest for conscience' sake which had urged the Fays and the
Thorleys out of the flat farmlands of East Anglia one hundred and thirty
years before.

During the intervening period the flat farmlands remained only as an
equalizing symbol. Thorleys, Fays, Willoughbys, and Brands worked for
one another with the community of interests developed in a beehive, and