Excerpt from A Rose of Yesterday:  I wonder what he meant by it, said Syl via, turning again in her chair, so that the summer light, softened and tinted by the drawn blinds, might fall upon the etching she held. My dear, answered Colonel Wimpole, stretching out his still graceful legs, leaning back in his chair, and slowly joining his nervous but hand some hands, nobody knows.

Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels. He was born at Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In 1879 he went to India, where he studied Sanskrit and edited the Allahabad Indian Herald. Returning to America he continued to study Sanskrit at Harvard University for a year, contributed to various periodicals, and in 1882 produced his first novel, Mr Isaacs. This book had an immediate success, and its author's promise was confirmed by the publication of Doctor Claudius: A True Story (1883). After a brief residence in New York and Boston, in 1883 he returned to Italy, where he made his permanent home. He also published the historical works, Ave Roma Immortalis (1898), Rulers of the South (1900) renamed Sicily, Calabria and Malta in 1904, and Gleanings from Venetian History (1905). The Saracinesca series is perhaps known to be his best work, with the third in the series, Don Orsino, set against the background of a real estate bubble, told with effective concision. A fourth book in the series, Corleone, was the first major treatment of the Mafia in literature.

Here's the basic storyline of A Rose of Yesterday: Two young men are in love with the same woman. Being that they're good friends, one man gallantly steps aside and lets the other woo and marry her. Of course, it’s the wrong man. The husband becomes a monster, drinking and beating his wife and son. The son, from too many blows on the head, is mentally simple, but he grows into a strapping man. It was at this point that he got tired of the abuse and gave his father blow for blow. The father was in an insane asylum for the next several years...

It's at this point that lover the good guy who has been pining for the last twenty years enters the story and tries to get the woman to divorce her husband and marry him. She won't. And then, by some strange twist of fate, husband regains sanity and is due for release....