The authors lost novel. A short novel with excruciating agony and a tragic ending. A charming start for Hardy in his quest to tell sad stories of impossible love. An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress (1878) is thought to be a revised version of Hardy's lost novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, an early work that the author destroyed. As Carl Weber wrote in his 1943 analysis, In An Indiscretion, just as in The Poor Man, the lovers meet in the Dorset church, and the meeting has the same result. The heiress commits her indiscretion, and the story comes to a characteristically Hardian conclusion.