A rich young widower with a Catholic estate is worked on by a Jesuit who intends the property for the Church, and the woman who loves him has no weapons but the truth. Collins wrote this in 1881 out of an anger the age shared, and the priest is his most intelligent villain - reasonable, kind, and entirely without doubt.

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist and playwright who worked in London. His fiction appeared serially in periodicals such as Charles Dickens's All the Year Round. Among his works are The Haunted Hotel, Man and Wife, The Law and the Lady, The New Magdalen, and The Moonstone, an early detective novel.