It happened in this way, towards the end of August 1842. In the grey of the summer evening, as the sunset faded and the twilight gathered, spreading itself tenderly over the pastures and cornfields, -- over the purple-green glooms of the fir forest -- over the open moors, whose surface is scored for miles by the turf-slane of the cottager and squatter -- over the clear, brown streams that trickle out of the pink and emerald mosses of the peat-bogs, and gain volume and rigor as they sparkle away by woodside, and green-lane, and village street -- and over those secret, bosky places, in the heart of the great common-lands, where the smooth, white stems and glossy foliage of the self-sown hollies spring up between the roots of the beech trees, where plovers cry, and stoat and weasel lurk and scamper, while the old poacher's lean, ill-favored, rusty-colored lurcher picks up a shrieking hare, and where wandering bands of gypsies -- those lithe, onyx-eyed children of the magic East -- still pitch their dirty, little, funguslike tents around the campfire, -- as the sunset died and the twilight thus softly widened and deepened, Lady Calmady found herself, for the first time during all the long summer day, alone...

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."