Excerpt from Lovers' Saint Ruth's: And Three Other Tales Fire of the Wessex sun. It is possible that the actual incident had come to Mr. Hardy' 3 notice also, and with a keen and pitiful interest for so expert a student of human nature. A curious circumstance in his relation ofit 13 that the elder child, in order that there may be more room in a hard world for the persons he loves, dis poses 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 ln his arms. But a friend of mine, Who read the manuscript in 1894, a writer of great insight whose opinion I value 1n 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, uncon sciously, 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.