There may come a time in the affairs of any man when he is compelled to choose between a dishonored existence and voluntary death. These unpleasant alternatives are now before me. You, who know me, would never doubt which of them I should adopt, nor will you upbraid me because our judgments coincide. There is nothing for it, Bruce, but quiet death--death in the least obtrusive form, and so disposed that it may be possible for you, chief among my friends and the only person I can trust to fulfil my wishes, to arrange that my memory may be speedily forgotten. My virtues, I fear, will not secure me immortality; my faults, I hope, will not be spread broadcast to cram the maws of the gaping crowd. I do not shirk this final issue, nor do I crave pity. In setting forth plainly the history of my wife's death and its results, I am actuated solely by a desire to protect others from needless suspicion. Having resolved to pay forfeit for my own errors, I claim to have expiated them. This document is an explanation, not a confession. I have not much time left wherein fittingly to shape my story so as to be just to all, myself included. If I am not mistaken, the officers of the law are in hot chase of me, but my statement shall not be made to an earthly judge. The words of a man about to die may not be well chosen; they should at least be true. I will tell of events as nearly as possible in their sequence of time. If I leave gaps through haste or forgetfulness you will, from your own knowledge of the facts, readily fill them up once you are in possession of the salient features. Mensmore and his sister were the friends of my early years. We played together as children. Gwendoline Mensmore was two years younger than I, and I well remember making love to her at the age of eleven. Her mother died when she was quite a baby, and her father married again, so her step-brother Albert is her junior by four years. I taught him how to ride and swim and play cricket. My father's place in Surrey--we did not acquire the Yorkshire property until the death of my grandfather--adjoined the estate General Mensmore occupied after his retirement from the army. We children always called Gwendoline "Dick," to avoid the difficulty of her long-sounding name, I suppose, and I honestly believe that our respective parents entertained the idea that a marriage between us was quite a natural thing. I went to school at Brighton, and Mensmore, being a somewhat precocious lad, joined the same school before I left. The headmaster, the Rev. Septimus Childe, was an old friend of my father's, and when he wished to purchase a house at Putney--the terrible house which has figured in my dreams for the past three months as a Place of Skulls--my parents put pressure on my mother's trustees to make the transaction an easy one. Of course, I knew it well. We regarded it in those early days as a town house, and always lived there during the season.