hem
afterwards with unfailing accuracy. It was therefore scarcely likely
that he kept notes of the articles he wrote about Van Torp.

But his employer did not know that Feist's memory was failing from
drink, and that he no longer trusted his marvellous faculty. Van Torp
had sequestrated him and shut him up, Bamberger believed; but neither
Van Torp nor any one else would get anything out of him.

And if any one made him talk, what great harm would be done, after
all? It was not to be supposed that such a man as Isidore Bamberger
had trusted only to his own keenness in collecting evidence, or to a
few pencilled notes as a substitute for the principal witness himself,
when an accident might happen at any moment to a man who led such a
life. The case for the prosecution had been quietly prepared during
several months past, and the evidence that was to send Rufus Van Torp
to execution, or to an asylum for the Criminal Insane for life, was in
the safe of Isidore Bamberger's lawyer in New York, unless, at that
very moment, it was already in the hands of the Public Prosecutor. A
couple of cables would do the rest at any time, and in a few hours.
In murder cases, the extradition treaty works as smoothly as the
telegraph itself. The American authorities would apply to the English
Home Secretary, the order would go to Scotland Yard, and Van Torp
would be arrested immediately and taken home by the first steamer, to
be tried in New York.

Six months earlier he might have pleaded insanity with a possible
chance, but in the present state of feeling the plea would hardly be
admitted. A man who has been held up to public execration in the press
for weeks, and whom no one attempts to defend, is in a bad case if a
well-grounded accusation of murder is brought against him at such a
moment; and Isidore Bamberger firmly believed in the truth of the
charge and in the validity of the evidence.

He consoled himself with these considerations, and with the reflection
that Feist was actually safer where he was, and less liable to
accident than if he were at large. Mr. Bamberger walked slowly down
Harley Street to Cavendish Square, with his head low between his
shoulders, his hat far back on his head, his eyes on the pavement, and
the shiny toes of his patent leather boots turned well out. His bowed
legs were encased in loose black trousers, and had as many angles as
the forepaws of a Dachshund or a Dandie Dinmont. The peculiarities of
his ung