DEDICATORY LETTER.
Brackenburn,
April 1925.
Dear Ethel and Arthur—
It is appropriate, in a way, that I should give you this book when so much of it was written under your roof. It is a romance, and this has not been, during the last twenty years, a favourable time for romances. But I like to give it to you because you know how it was written, in a. very happy summer after a long and arduous lecture tour during which, more than ever before, I learned to love your country.
I wrote it as a rest and a refreshment, and I will tell you frankly that I have enjoyed writing it very much. But I do not know whether, in these stern days, stories are intended to be enjoyed either by the writer of them or the reader.
I have noticed sometimes that people speak rather scornfully of a story as "readable." But if it be not first of all "readable" what afterwards can it be? Surely dead before it is born.
I hope then, and I believe, that this tale is "read-
