The Queen of Hearts | Page 3

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[Etext by James Rusk ([email protected]) Italics are indicated with
underscore]

The Queen of Hearts
by Wilkie Collins

LETTER OF DEDICATION.
--------- TO
EMILE FORGUES. -----
AT a time when French readers were altogether unaware of the
existence of any books of my writing, a critical examination of my
novels appeared under your signature in the Revue des Deux Moudes. I
read that article, at the time of its appearance, with sincere pleasure and
sincere gratitude to the writer, and I have honestly done my best to
profit by it ever since.
At a later period, when arrangements were made for the publication of
my novels in Paris, you kindly undertook, at some sacrifice of your
own convenience, to give the first of the series--"The Dead Secret"--the
great advantage of being rendered into French by your pen. Your
excellent translation of "The Lighthouse" had already taught me how to
appreciate the value of your assistance; and when "The Dead Secret"
appeared in its French form, although I was sensibly gratified, I was by
no means 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 with her.
A word about ourselves, first of all--a necessary word, to explain the
singular situation of our fair young guest.
We are three brothers; and we live in a barbarous, dismal old house
called The Glen Tower. Our place of abode stands in a hilly, lonesome
district of South Wales. No such thing as a line of railway runs
anywhere near us. No gentleman's seat is within an easy drive of us.
We are at an unspeakably inconvenient distance