the
satisfaction of any reader who may care for consistency in such matters.

This is the only material change; for, as it happened that certain
characteristics which provoked most discussion in my latest story were
present in this my first--published in 1871, when there was no French
name for them it has seemed best to let them stand unaltered.

T.H. February 1896.

I. THE EVENTS OF THIRTY YEARS

1. DECEMBER AND JANUARY, 1835-36

In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which
renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward
Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the issue
was a Christmas visit.

In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect who
had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland town of
Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to spend the
Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury. They had
gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after graduating together,
Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought
which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness;
on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three.

Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in
a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it
was ever a surprise.

While in London he became acquainted with a retired officer in the
Navy named Bradleigh, who, with his wife and their daughter, lived in
a street not far from Russell Square. Though they were in no more than
comfortable circumstances, the captain's wife came of an ancient family
whose genealogical tree was interlaced with some of the most illustrious
and well-known in the kingdom.

The young lady, their daughter, seemed to Graye by far the most
beautiful and queenly being he had ever beheld. She was about nineteen
or twenty, and her name was Cytherea. In truth she was not so very
unlike country girls of that type of beauty, except in one respect.
She was perfect in her manner and bearing, and they were not. A mere
distinguishing peculiarity, by catching the eye, is often read as
the pervading characteristic, and she appeared to him no less than
perfection throughout--transcending her rural rivals in very nature.
Graye did a thing the blissfulness of which was only eclipsed by its
hazardousness. He