Into the Highways and Hedges

SEVENTH EDITION
London 1896
HUTCHINSON & CO. 34 PATERNOSTER ROW
Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life's set prize, be it what it will.
Dedicated TO MY MOTHER
This is not meant to be a controversial novel. I by no means agree with all Barnabas Thorpe's opinions. Nevertheless I believe that the men who fight for their ideals have been, and always will be, the saving element in a world which happily has never yet been left without them.
Before and since the days when Socrates found that it was impossible to live a quiet life, for that would be to disobey the deity, there have always been some souls who have counted it worth while to lose all else, if haply in the losing they might get nearer to the light from which they came. Their failures, their apparently hopeless mistakes, are often evident enough, yet the mistakes die, and the spirit which animates them lives. It would be dark, indeed, if the torches of those eager runners were to go out.
F. F. M.
The woman whose story is written here, was in the fulness of her youth some fifty years ago.
She is dead now, and so are the two men who loved her best, who would each, according to his lights, have given his life for her happiness.
Her name is inscribed in the family Bible, that holds on its flyleaf the generation of Deanes, but there is a thick stroke through it, which almost obliterates the delicate characters, and there is no record either of her marriage or of her death.
She made a great mistake; she was one of the people who blunder on a large scale, who put all their eggs into one basket, and who are apt to break their hearts as well as their goods; but, in so far as her life did not end in pure tragedy, it seemed to me worth the telling.