him. I am glad he made good his escape
while I was seeing his companion safe upstairs. If I had found him where
I left him, God knows what violence I might not have done him after all.
The boy has good in him, and more courage than he knows himself; again I
say that I am glad he has escaped unscathed. His life was not safe, but
now I shall only take my own."

"Yes! I have made up my mind; it is better than leaving it to the common
hangman of this besotted country. I know what to expect in enlightened
England: either a death unfit for a dog, or existence worse than death in
a criminal lunatic asylum. I prefer my own peculiar quietus; it has stood
on my table all night long, ready and pointed at my heart; a hand upon the
door, a step behind me, and I should have rolled over dead at their feet.
So it will be if even now they are waiting for me outside; but, if not, I
know where to go, where already it is broad daylight, where the wide open
space will quicken and enhance every ray, and the broad river multiply the
sun by a million facets of living fire. It is not the light that will
fail me, there; and as I have served others, so also will I serve myself,
and it may be with better fortune than they have brought me. Who knows?
It would be in keeping with the poetic ironies of this existence. At all
events, unless waylaid at once, I am giving it a chance. I shall place
the camera on the parapet of the Embankment. I have fitted the shutter
with a specially long pneumatic tube, and the bulb will do its double work
as usual when my fingers relax. I have long had it all in my mind. I
have written full instructions on the envelope which I shall stick by the
flap to the open slide; if we are found by a reasonably intelligent
person, the slide will be shut, and the camera handed over bodily to the
police. They, I think, may be trusted to honour one's last instructions,
if only out of curiosity; their eyes will be the first to read what I fear
they will describe as my 'full confession.' Well, it is 'full,' and the
substantive must be left to them. So long as the document does not fall
into one little pair of gentle hands, I shall lie easy in whatever
ignominious grave they lay me. That is why I hide it where I do: since,
if it fell first into those hands, it would never see the light at all."

There was a little more, but Phillida suddenly snatched the MS. away, and
wept over the end, bitterly, and yet not altogether