I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and
many dreams that we have shared.

You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with
the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote.
You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913;
so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on
our Egyptian journey.

_C'est bien loin, tout cela_! War overtook it in its serial course; and
now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the
moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.

These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our
home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted
as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to
live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to
modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date;
but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we
from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last
words.

Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there,
across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's
work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel
that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice
thundering across the lawn. . . ?

W.J.L.