[The Queen of Hearts by Wilkie Collins]@TWC D-Link book
The Queen of Hearts

CHAPTER IV
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The lady answered that it was too long a story to tell then, and explained, on my suggesting that she should relate it on some future day, that she was about to start for her country home the next morning.

'But,' she was good enough to add, 'as I have been under great obligations to you for many Sundays past, and as you seem interested in this matter, I will employ my first leisure time after my return in telling you by writing, instead of by word of mouth, what really happened to me on one memorable night of my life in The Black Cottage.' "She faithfully performed her promise.

In a fortnight afterward I received from her the narrative which I am now about to read." BROTHER OWEN'S STORY OF THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK COTTAGE.
To begin at the beginning, I must take you back to the time after my mother's death, when my only brother had gone to sea, when my sister was out at service, and when I lived alone with my father in the midst of a moor in the west of England.
The moor was covered with great limestone rocks, and intersected here and there by streamlets.

The nearest habitation to ours was situated about a mile and a half off, where a strip of the fertile land stretched out into the waste like a tongue.

Here the outbuildings of the great Moor Farm, then in the possession of my husband's father, began.


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