It is the necessary law of such a story as mine that the persons concerned in it only appear when the course of events takes them up⁠—they come and go, not by favour of my personal partiality, but by right of their direct connection with the circumstances to be detailed. For this reason, not Pesca alone, but my mother and sister as well, have been left far in the background of the narrative. My visits to the Hampstead cottage, my mother’s belief in the denial of Laura’s identity which the conspiracy had accomplished, my vain efforts to overcome the prejudice on her part and on my sister’s to which, in their jealous affection for me, they both continued to adhere, the painful necessity which that prejudice imposed on me of concealing my marriage from them till they had learnt to do justice to my wife⁠—all these little domestic occurrences have been left unrecorded because they were not essential to the main interest of the story. It is nothing that they added to my anxieties and embittered my disappointments⁠—the steady march of events has inexorably passed them by.