author, having presumably grown in knowledge of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, was asked to revise the text, and being confronted with the printed page, was overcome by the temptation to add now and then a sentence, line, or paragraph, while the charming shade of Miss Kitty Schuyler perched on every exclamation point, begging permission to say a trifle, just a trifle, more.

‘You might allow me to explain myself just there,’ she coaxed; ‘and if you have told them all I was supposed to be thinking in Winchester or Salisbury or Oxford, why not tell them what I thought in Bath or Peterborough or Ely? It was awfully interesting!’

Jack Copley, too, clamoured to be heard still further on the subject of his true-love’s charms, so the author yielded to this twofold pressure, and added a few corroborative details.

The little courtship, running its placid course through sleepy cathedral towns, has not been altered in the least by these new pages. It is only as if [p ix] the story-teller, meeting a new pair of interested eyes, had almost unconsciously drifted into fresh confidences.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN.

This is all quite true, and anyway we have said nothing that we are a bit ashamed of.

Their mark.

London, July, 1901.

[p xi]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS