The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stella Fregelius, by H. Rider Haggard

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: Stella Fregelius

Author: H. Rider Haggard

Release Date: April 22, 2006 [EBook #6051]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STELLA FREGELIUS ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

STELLA FREGELIUS

A TALE OF THREE DESTINIES

By H. Rider Haggard

First Published 1904.

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus; strepitumque Acherontis avari."

DEDICATION

My Dear John Berwick,

When you read her history in MS. you thought well of "Stella Fregelius"
and urged her introduction to the world. Therefore I ask you, my severe
and accomplished critic, to accept the burden of a book for which you
are to some extent responsible. Whatever its fate, at least it has
pleased you and therefore has not been written quite in vain.

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
do with his charac