1st Edition 1910. Includes a Long Letter Tipped into the Endpaper to Ralph Straus, novelist and biographer from the author. Also has Ralph Straus bookplate. William John Locke (20 March 1863 – 15 May 1930) was a British novelist, dramatist and playwright, best known for his short stories. The story is - Learning he has six months to live, the wealthy Simon De Gex decides to tell no one of his impending death and to spend his fortune madly. He breaks off his engagement to Eleanor Faversham, then is approached in a park by a killer and is enlisted in a plot to kill the deserting husband of the beautiful Lola, a cat trainer at the London Hippodrome. The murder plans are carried out in Paris; the killer stabs Lola's husband and Simon departs, only to be overcome by his sickness. Selflessly Lola nurses him back to health, but, ridiculed as low-class by Eleanor and Dale, Simon's secretary, she returns to the theater. Cured by a daring operation, Simon sets out to find Lola. His search is rewarded but coincides with the reappearance of the demented killer. In a fury of rejection, the killer accidentally blinds his beloved. Simon devotes himself to Lola, but she resists his proposals until a second miraculous operation restores her eyesight and frees her to marry in good conscience. Ralph Strauss was an English novelist and biographer. Born in 1882 in Manchester and educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Straus is best known as the author of "Dickens, a Portrait in Pencil" (1928) and "Dickens, the Man and Book" (1936). He also wrote a mystical fantasy, "The Dust Which Is God" (1907); "The Unseemly Adventures" (1924); "Married Alive" (1925); and "Five Men Go to Prison" (1935). Strauss died in 1950.