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.

CHAPTER I.

OURSELVES.

WE were three quiet, lonely old men, and SHE was a lively,
handsome young woman, and we were at our wits' end what to do