H. Rider Haggard.

Ditchingham,

25th August, 1903.




AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author feels that he owes some apology to his readers for his
boldness in offering to them a modest story which is in no sense a
romance of the character that perhaps they expect from him; which has,
moreover, few exciting incidents and no climax of the accustomed order,
since the end of it only indicates its real beginning.

His excuse must be that, in the first instance, he wrote it purely to
please himself and now publishes it in the hope that it may please some
others. The problem of such a conflict, common enough mayhap did we
but know it, between a departed and a present personality, of which
the battle-ground is a bereaved human heart and the prize its complete
possession; between earthly duty and spiritual desire also; was one that
had long attracted him. Finding at length a few months of leisure, he
treated the difficult theme, not indeed as he would have wished to do,
but as best he could.

He may explain further that when he drafted this book, now some five
years ago, instruments of the nature of the "aerophone" were not so much
talked of as they are to-day. In fact this aerophone has little to