Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by William Powell Frith, William Morris Hunt and Jean-François Millet. A girl of fifteen is married secretly to save her from a man twice her age who wants her fortune, and the ceremony has to be kept from everyone including her guardian. Collins invented the detective novel with The Moonstone; this 1871 novella is a Christmas piece, worked out with his usual legal exactness — the whole plot depends on what a marriage was and was not under English law. Fifty-six plates, among them Sisley and Marianne North, trace the quiet interiors and night seas that shadow a plot turning on what a marriage was and was not.