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A clerk’s dissatisfied wife borrows a glittering necklace for one night among the wealthy, then pays dearly when it vanishes.
A lonely woman adopts an orphan for love, then begins to fear the silent young man growing up inside her house.
A late-night walk with a nervous pedlar leads a young oarsman into a poor household where each sound suggests the wrong kind of danger.
A surgeon’s false tale about a stolen saint’s relic impresses his devout fiancée—until she visits Cologne herself.
A confident Parisian explains how two carefully scheduled affairs collapsed through a silent exchange of pins in his bedroom.
A bored baroness copies a window signal she sees across the street and discovers that curiosity can be taken as a business offer.
A Parisian libertine becomes consumed by a stranger whose identity remains beyond his reach.
A suitor under constant observation begins a secret affair, then mistakes the wrong woman at a château window.
A ferry passenger learns why an old friend’s marriage soured after his once-enchanting English bride became easier to understand.
A solitary collector watches every object in his beloved house walk away into the night—and no explanation can make the sight less real.
When an ostrich supposedly swallows a priceless diamond aboard ship, five ordinary birds become the stakes in an escalating auction.
A shipwreck survivor in a diving suit is mistaken for a god, but keeping up the role may cost him the treasure he came to recover.
A mild schoolmaster tests his courage with a harmless mock burglary and stumbles into a real criminal escape.
A young schoolmaster receives a golden fruit said to grant perfect knowledge, just as he begins his respectable new career.
A young man forbidden to risk his finest clothes chooses one moonlit night to wear them freely and embrace the world beyond his home.
A sighted mountaineer falls into an isolated valley where blindness is universal—and learns that his advantage has no accepted meaning.
A successful politician confides that a green door has offered him glimpses of a lost garden of perfect happiness throughout his life.
A professional burglar poses as a landscape painter, only to find that art criticism is the least predictable hazard of the job.
A father follows his young son into a shop where stage tricks become genuine magic and every doorway leads deeper from ordinary London.
A chemistry accident sends an ordinary schoolmaster into a shadow world that overlaps the lives of everyone he knew.
A confident skeptic spends the night in a notorious room, armed with candles and reason against its dark reputation.
A laboratory accident blinds Davidson to London and replaces it with a vivid view of a remote island that may be more than hallucination.
Over whisky, a taxidermist boasts that preserving nature is only the beginning of his art—and explains how easily collectors can be fooled.
An obese clubman demands an old family remedy for losing weight, only to discover how literally the recipe works.
