FROM THE AUTHOR TO THE READER

Many readers of newspapers who have been accustomed to follow the reports of those magnificent proceedings of Ventris Blake, the noted American financier, in London, may be surprised to find so vivid a searchlight as the following thrown on the private life of a millionaire who, in his time, has made several British industries tremble.

Most public men, however, have two, if not more, selves—the self they shew to the world at large, which is generally fair and clean to look upon, and the self which in secret they hide from their best friends, and, if possible, keep out of their tell-tale features.

It is, therefore, good sometimes for the public to get away from the phantasmagoria of a princely residence in Park Lane and the brilliant evolution of the descriptive reporter, and, in the privacy of their own rooms, to take as it were, one of these creatures of Fortune to pieces—to see the stuff he is made of, to follow the effect of wealth upon his humanity, and to learn whether the beautiful principles he espouses with so much unwelcome vocal violence in the open are really in use in his every-day existence, or, are like the carpet he rolls across the pavement when giving some stately dinner party—often on show, but seldom trodden on!

This, of course, in another sense, is only a simple love story—the story of Winifred Pontifex and of her mysterious vicissitudes, temptations and dangers, but in as much as it unmasks men of the stamp of Ventris Blake it must always stand for something more than fiction, and may well serve to explore but little-known regions of crooked London life. Some cynics assert that every man has a skeleton in his cupboard. Certainly Ventris Blake had—and hence this narrative of “The Three Glass Eyes.”

WILLIAM LE QUEUX.