tchen garden, burned the whole lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the
evidence of Adrian's guilt, I could not at the time imagine. It was only
later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn
the papers in his flat, because he had no fire--only the electric
radiator. You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six
thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his
idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his
next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and
throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two
voyages that year--if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage--at a
moment's notice. In each case he had not had occasion to call at his
chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made. As for
discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to
discover them? Such friends as he had would never pry into his private
concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole
matter to them was unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's
Mansions, he considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that
he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That I
bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to
destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long time I felt
the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms. If I had been
a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I
have always prided myself on being--not the last word, for that would
not be consonant with my natural modesty--but, say, the penultimate word
of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other's
bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless
fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to
anybody.

The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great
fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever
set Humpty-Dumpty up again.

Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. _Moi qui
vous parle_, I have read all of them; and