Chapter 1

THE TENTH DAY

BROTHER OWEN’S STORY of ANNE RODWAY
THE NIGHT
THE MORNING

LETTER OF DEDICATION.

TO EMILE FORGUES.

At a time when French readers were altogether unaware of the existence
of any books of my writing, a critical examination of my novels
appeared under your signature in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. I read
that article, at the time of its appearance, with sincere pleasure and
sincere gratitude to the writer, and I have honestly done my best to
profit by it ever since.

At a later period, when arrangements were made for the publication of
my novels in Paris, you kindly undertook, at some sacrifice of your own
convenience, to give the first of the series—“The Dead Secret”—the
great advantage of being rendered into French by your pen. Your
excellent translation of “The Lighthouse” had already taught me how to
appreciate the value of your assistance; and when “The Dead Secret”
appeared in its French form, although I was sensibly gratified, I was
by no means surprised to find my fortunate work of fiction, not
translated, in the mechanical sense of the word, but transformed from a
novel that I had written in my language to a novel that you might have
written in yours.

I am now about to ask you to confer one more literary obligation on me
by accepting the dedication of this book, as the earliest
acknowledgment which it has been in my power to make of the debt I owe
to my critic, to my translator, and to my friend.

The stories which form the principal contents of the following pages
are all, more or less, exercises in that art which I have now studied
anxiously for some years, and which I still hope to cultivate, to
better and better purpose, for many more. Allow me, by inscribing the
collection to you, to secure one reader for it at the outset of its
progress through the world of letters whose capacity for seeing all a
writer’s defects may be matched by many other critics, but whose rarer
faculty of seeing all a writer’s merits is equaled by very few.

WILKIE COLLINS.

THE QUEEN OF HEARTS.