



Produced by James Rusk





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 Mondes_. 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 from a town, and the village
to which we send for our letters is three miles off.

My eldest brother, Owen, was brought up to the Church. All the prime of
his life was passed in a populous London parish. For more years than I
now like to reckon up, he worked unremittingly, in defiance of failing
health and adverse fortune, amid the multitudinous misery of the London
poor; and he would, in all probability, have sacrificed his life to his
duty long before the present time if The Glen Tower had not come into
his possession through two unexpected deaths in the elder and richer
branch of our family. This opening to him of a place of rest and refuge
saved his life. No man ever drew breath who better deserved the gifts
of fortune; for no man, I sincerely believe, more tender of others,
more diffident of himself, more gentle, more generous, and more
simple-hearted than Owen, ever walked this earth.

My second brother, Morgan, started in life as a doctor, and learned all
that his profession could teach him at home and abroad. He realized a
moderate independence by his practice, beginning in one of our large
northern towns and ending as a physician in London; but, although he was
well known and appreciated among his brethren, he failed to gain
that sort of reputation with the public which elevates a man into the
position of a great doctor. The ladies never liked him. In the first
place, he was ugly (Morgan will excuse me for mentioning this); in the
second place, he was an inveterate smoker, and he smelled of tobacco
when he felt languid pulses in elegant bedrooms; in the third place,
he was the most formidably outspoken teller of the truth as regarded
himself, his profession, and his patients, that ever imperiled the
social standing of the science of medicine. For these reasons, and for
others which it is not necessary to mention, he never pushed his way,
as a doctor, into the front ranks, and he never cared to do so. About
a year after Owen came into possession of The Glen Tower,