EXPLANATORY NOTE
THE main portion of the following story appeared—with slight modifications—in the Graphic newspaper; other chapters, more especially addressed to adult readers, in the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer, as episodic sketches. My thanks are tendered to the editors and proprietors of those periodicals for enabling me now to piece the trunk and limbs of the novel together, and print it complete, as originally written two years ago.
I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as representing on the whole a true sequence of things; and I would ask any too genteel reader who cannot endure to have it said what everybody thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.
November, 1891.
