probed deep enough. Few very young men--and I was very young then--do
probe very deeply. At the appearance of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac',
however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my future was assured.

I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of the
Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning', and
'The Right of Way' portrayed. That life was destined to give me an
assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
attention.

Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind
of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure
in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of being a
mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an impudent
melodrama, which has its own fascinations."

Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise in