Fiction · 1898
Dainty’s Cruel Rivals
Or, The Fatal Birthday
Dainty Chase, eighteen and golden-haired, is due to travel from Richmond to the Ellsworth estate in the West Virginia mountains — but her cousins and boarding-mates Olive Peyton and Ela Craye, both jealous schoolteachers angling to marry the heir themselves, abandon her at the last minute, gambling she'll be too timid to go alone. Instead the heir, Lovelace Ellsworth, comes to escort her himself and falls for her along the way. Once she's installed at Ellsworth, under the ivy-covered old stone wing the servants swear is haunted, Olive and Ela turn to a forged rival lover, ghost stories, and rigged fortune-telling to break the match.
It was copyrighted in 1898 by George Munro's Sons and later reprinted by the Arthur Westbrook Company of Cleveland as No. 88 in its Hart Series.
Bibliomancer restores the 1898 text exactly as Miller wrote it.
Contents
- Chapter I — “A Sweet Girl Graduate.”
- Chapter II — “The Prettiest Girl in the Room!”
- Chapter III — The Happiest Day She Had Ever Known
- Chapter IV — The Old Monk
- Chapter V — “Only a Dream.”
- Chapter VI — Love’s Rosy Dawn
- Chapter VII — “The Trail of the Serpent.”
- Chapter VIII — The Ellsworth Honor
- Chapter IX — “All That’s Bright Must Fade.”
- Chapter X — “The Grim Fates.”
- Chapter XI — Love’s Presentiments
- Chapter XII — A Maddened Lover
- Chapter XIII — Sad Forebodings
- Chapter XIV — Dainty Would Never Forget That Day
- Chapter XV — Black Mammy’s Story
- Chapter XVI — The Ghost Alarm
- Chapter XVII — The Night Before the Wedding
- Chapter XVIII — The Wedding Morn
- Chapter XIX — A Madman’s Deed
- Chapter XX — The End of the Day
- Chapter XXI — Would Heaven Turn Away from Her Wild Appeal?
- Chapter XXII — Unmasked
- Chapter XXIII — Ah! The Pity of It!
- Chapter XXIV — The Darkest Hour
- Chapter XXV — Among Strangers
- Chapter XXVI — The Mother’s Woe
- Chapter XXVII
- Chapter XXVIII — More Bitter Than Death
- Chapter XXIX — As We Kiss the Dead
- Chapter XXX — A Terrible Deed
- Chapter XXXI — Lost! Lost! Lost!
- Chapter XXXII
- Chapter XXXIII — A New Home
- Chapter XXXIV — Thrown on the World
- Chapter XXXV — Grand Company
- Chapter XXXVI — “Only to See You, My Darling.”
- Chapter XXXVII — A Wonderful Discovery
- Chapter XXXVIII — Good News
- Chapter XXXIX — “For All Eternity.”
- Chapter XL — Conclusion
New editions
Never lose your place.
This book is free to read in full, and stays that way. Leave an address: one click confirms it and opens a free account, so your progress and bookmarks sync across every device. You'll also hear when the next restored edition enters the archive. Terminate at any time.
About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1850–1937 · Victorian
Alex. McVeigh Miller was the pen name of Mittie Frances Clarke Point (1850–1937), born in Doswell, Virginia, and educated at the Richmond Female Institute. Widowed young — her first husband and their infant daughter died within two years of the marriage — she remarried in 1878, taking her byline from her second husband, West Virginia schoolteacher Alexander McVeigh Miller, and began writing to help support the household. She became one of the best-paid dime novelists of her day, publishing roughly eighty romances for Street & Smith between 1881 and 1915, including The Bride of the Tomb (1883) and Dainty's Cruel Rivals (1898). She divorced Miller in 1908 and later settled in Florida, where she died at eighty-seven.
Adjacent records
