But I will say that, in the writing, I do not think Freydon had considered the question of publication. I do not think that in these last exercises of his pen he wrote consciously for the printer and the public. As those who know his published work are aware, he was much given to literary allusiveness and to quotation. In these papers such characteristic pages did occur, it is true, but in practically every case they had been scrawled over in pencil, and have been studiously omitted by me in my preparation of the manuscript for the press. Here and there it was clear that entire pages had been removed and apparently destroyed by their writer. Again, in this record, Freydon--always in his writings for the press, literary and journalistic, meticulous in the matter of constructive detail--clearly gave no thought to the arrangement of chapters or other divisions. He wrote of his life, as he has said, to enable himself to see it as a whole. For my part I have felt a natural delicacy about intruding so far as to introduce chapter headings or the like. It was easy for me to note the points at which the writer had laid aside his pen, presumably at the day's end, for there a portion of a sheet was left blank, and sometimes a zig-zag line was drawn. At these points then, where the writer himself paused, I have allowed the pause to appear. And this, in effect, represents the sum of my small contribution to the volume; for I have altered nothing, added nothing, and taken nothing away, beyond those previously mentioned passages (literary rather than documentary) which the author's own pencil had marked for deletion; the removal, where these occurred, of references to myself; and the substitution, where that seemed desirable, of imaginary proper names for the names of actual places and living people as written by my friend. Two other points, and the task which for me has certainly been a labour of love, is done. Nicholas Freydon was perfectly correct in his belief that he might have wooed and won the lady who is referred to in these pages as Mrs. Oldcastle. In this, as in other episodes of his life which happen to be known to me, the motives behind his self-abnegation were in the highest degree creditable to him. This I have been asked to say, and I am glad to say it. Among Freydon's papers was one which, for a time, greatly puzzled me. Once I had learned precisely what this paper meant, it became for me most deeply significant, knowing as I did that it must have been lying where I found it, in a drawer of Freydon's work-table, while he wrote, immediately before his last illness, the final sections of this work, including its penultimate chapter; including, therefore, such passages as these: