for
yourself. You notice the slightness of the thumbs and of he two
'little' fingers. They are the hands of a weak and over-sensitive
man--a man without confidence, a man who would certainly waver in an
emergency. Rather Hamletish hands," he mused. "And I'm like Hamlet in
other respects, too: I'm no fool, and I've rather a noble disposition,
and I'm unlucky. But Hamlet was luckier than I in one thing: he was a
murderer by accident, whereas the murders that I committed one day
fourteen years ago--for I must tell you it wasn't one murder, but many
murders that I committed--were all of them due to the wretched inherent
weakness of my own wretched self.

"I was twenty-six--no, twenty-seven years old, and rather a nondescript
person, as I am now. I was supposed to have been called to the bar.
In fact, I believe I HAD been called to the bar. I hadn't listened to
the call. I never intended to practise, and I never did practise. I
only wanted an excuse in the eyes of the world for existing. I suppose
the nearest I have ever come to practicing is now at this moment: I am
defending a murderer. My father had left me well enough provided with
money. I was able to go my own desultory way, riding my hobbies where
I would. I had a good stableful of hobbies. Palmistry was one of
them. I was rather ashamed of this one. It seemed to me absurd, as it
seems to you. Like you, though, I believed in it. Unlike you, I had
done more than merely read a book about it. I had read innumerable
books about it. I had taken casts of all my friends' hands. I had
tested and tested again the points at which Desbarolles dissented from
the Gipsies, and--well, enough that I had gone into it all rather
thoroughly, and was as sound a palmist, as a man may be without giving
his whole life to palmistry.

"One of the first things I had seen in my own hand, as soon as I had
learned to read it, was that at about the age of twenty-six I should
have a narrow escape from death--from a violent death. There was a
clean break in the life-line, and a square joining it--the protective
square, you know. The markings were precisely the same in both hands.
It was to be the narrowest escape possible. And I wasn't going to
escape without injury, either. That is what bothered me. There was a
faint line connecting the break in the lifeline with a star on the line
of health. Against that star was another square. I was to recover
from the injury, whate