LOVERS' SAINT RUTH'S And Three Other Tales BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY [Illustration] BOSTON COPELAND AND DAY M DCCC XCV COPYRIGHT BY COPELAND AND DAY 1895 TO CLARENCE J. BLAKE AND FRANCES H. BLAKE, A BOOK FINISHED ON THEIR OWN WILD ACRES OF THE MAINE COAST. October, 1894. AUTHOR'S PREFACE. THE contents of this book have, hitherto, never been printed nor published. One chapter among them, _The Provider_, is based very literally on a tragic thing which happened, some years ago, in Dublin, and which, figuring as a cable despatch of some ten lines in a Boston daily newspaper, fell under my eye, to be remembered, and afterwards cast into its present form. In the September (1895) number of _Harpers' Magazine_, little Father Time and his adopted brother, in _Hearts Insurgent_, end their innocent lives from Hughey's strange motive, though not in his manner. It is perhaps worth while to state that my story was finished and laid by, prior to the appearance of the novel in its serial form, lest I should seem fain to melt my waxen wings in the fire of the Wessex sun. It is possible that the actual incident had come to Mr. Hardy's notice also, and with a keen and pitiful interest for so expert a student of human nature. A curious circumstance in his relation of it is that the elder child, in order that there may be more room in a hard world for the persons he loves, disposes not only of himself, but presumably of the younger child as well; and in the original version of my story Hughey jumped into the river with his sister Nora in his arms. But a friend of mine, who read the manuscript in 1894, a writer of great insight whose opinion I value in the extreme, so wrought with me to change the cruel ending, that I did so then and there, after some argument, and sent the boy of "long, long thoughts" uncompanied to his fate. The point of all this is, of course, that I now perceive my small invention had dared, unconsciously, to keep yet closer pace than would appear with Mr. Hardy's; for the suicide of real life was the suicide of one child alone. The other three sketches here are more imaginative; and the first of them, which bears the earliest date, was, from end to end, a dream, and is somewhat reluctantly included. They stand for apprentice-work in fiction, and are my only attempts of that kind. L. I. G. LONDON, September 6th, 1895. Contents Lovers' Saint Ruth's Page 1 Our Lady of the Union 29 An Event on the River 63 The Provider 93 LOVERS' SAINT RUTH'S.