"I needn't go into details, Hammond," Leversedge said. "That camp was dead. Even in the night, which decently hides a good deal, it was a ghastly place. I suppose they'd all died of thirst, they and the oxen. And I had fever on me. I shall never know quite all I did see. But in one of the wagons I made out a dead woman. Underneath it a dog was tied, a small, yellowish cur, the only thing left alive, and it yapped. And -- and -- there had been a child in the wagon, a little baby-child -- and I suppose it had lived longer than the rest. And it must have crawled out over the tail of the wagon, and fallen close to the dog. . . ." The image of that dog came to haunt Leversedge -- and in the end, when he was married (and happy, he thought), it came to rule his life. In the end, it would destroy him.

Author Biography

Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley (1852 - 1931), a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) were especially popular. Malet scholar Talia Schaffer notes that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world" at the height of her career, but her reputation declined by the end of her life and today she is rarely read or studied. At the height of her popularity she was "compared favorably to Thomas Hardy and Henry James, with sales rivaling Rudyard Kipling."