s suddenly come into my head?' said I,
suddenly--leaning further and further over the rail.

"'Surely not to throw yourself into the river?' cried Bachmatoff in
alarm. Perhaps he read my thought in my face.

"'No, not yet. At present nothing but the following consideration. You
see I have some two or three months left me to live--perhaps four; well,
supposing that when I have but a month or two more, I take a fancy for
some "good deed" that needs both trouble and time, like this business of
our doctor friend, for instance: why, I shall have to give up the idea
of it and take to something else--some LITTLE good deed, MORE WITHIN MY
MEANS, eh? Isn't that an amusing idea!'

"Poor Bachmatoff was much impressed--painfully so. He took me all the
way home; not attempting to console me, but behaving with the greatest
delicacy. On taking leave he pressed my hand warmly and asked permission
to come and see me. I replied that if he came to me as a 'comforter,' so
to speak (for he would be in that capacity whether he spoke to me in a
soothing manner or only kept silence, as I pointed out to him), he
would but remind me each time of my approaching death! He shrugged his
shoulders, but quite agreed with me; and we parted better friends than I
had expected.

"But that evening and that night were sown the first seeds of my 'last
conviction.' I seized greedily on my new idea; I thirstily drank in
all its different aspects (I did not sleep a wink that night!), and the
deeper I went into it the more my being seemed to merge itself in it,
and the more alarmed I became. A dreadful terror came over me at last,
and did not leave me all next day.

"Sometimes, thinking over this, I became quite numb with the terror
of it; and I might well have deduced from this fact, that my 'last
conviction' was eating into my being too fast and too seriously, and
would undoubtedly come to its climax before long. And for the climax I
needed greater determination than I yet possessed.

"However, within three weeks my determination was taken, owing to a very
strange circumstance.

"Here on my paper, I make a note of all the figures and dates that
come into my explanation. Of course, it is all the same to me, but just
now--and perhaps only at this moment--I desire that all those who are to
judge of my action should see clearly out of how logical a sequence of
deductions has at length proceeded my 'last conviction.'

"I have said above that the determinat