A PREFATORY WORD


The story told in the present book owes something to the past, in its
picturing of the present, as its predecessors have done; though in
much less degree. The artist, as I hold, may gather from any field,
so long as he sacredly respects what other artists have already made
their own by the transmuting processes of the mind. To draw on the
conceptions or the phrases that have once passed through the warm
minting of another's brain, is, for us moderns, at any rate, the
literary crime of crimes. But to the teller of stories, all that is
recorded of the real life of men, as well as all that his own eyes can
see, is offered for the enrichment of his tale. This is a clear and
simple principle; yet it has been often denied. To insist upon it is,
in my belief, to uphold the true flag of Imagination, and to defend
the wide borders of Romance.

In addition to this word of notice, which my readers will perhaps
accept from me once for all, this small preface must also contain
a word of thanks to my friend Mr. Sterner, whose beautiful art has
contributed to this story, as to several of its forerunners. I have
to thank him, indeed, not only as an artist, but as a critic. In the
interpreting of Fenwick, he has given me valuable aid; has corrected
mistakes, and illumined his own painter's craft for me, as none but
a painter can. But his poetic intelligence as an artist is what makes
him so rare a colleague. In the first lovely drawing of the husband
and wife sitting by the Westmoreland stream, Phoebe's face and look
will be felt, I think, by any sympathetic reader, as a light on the
course of the story; reappearing, now in storm, as in the picture of
her despair, before the portrait of her supposed rival; and now in