“Say no more, my poor fellow,” said Gilead. “It is all plain, and you shall spare yourself. It was like this, was it not? In the midst of your horror, the awful responsibility, the awful peril you had incurred smote you out of stupefaction, and, without giving another thought to your purpose, you turned and fled, leaving that tragic thumb-mark for a clue to your pursuers?” The young man thanked him with a look full of pathos and gratitude. “I thought I should die, mercifully die,” he whispered, “when I heard what I had done. It must have been on the door-post, which I clutched to save myself from falling. Somehow I got home unobserved, and washed my hands; and then--O, my God, the cruel irony of Fate!--I found a letter awaiting me, offering me a post in a big law-printers and stationers to whom I had applied. If it had only come a week earlier!” Miss Halifax, with a motion of infinite pity, touched his mutilated arm. Her intuition had already guessed the truth. He looked up at her with a faint smile. “Yes, Miss,” he said--“the day that I began work, I was standing by a printing machine, when I heard one of my companions read out that very description of the suicide I showed you, and learnt for the first time of the clue I had left. I was again wearing my thumb-stall, and, not out of courage, but in a simple impulsive frenzy, I thrust my hand among the moving machinery, and the next moment fainted. When I came definitely to my senses, it was to find myself--with joy and relief--secure for ever from the witness I most feared. But, heaven help me, it was only a respite. “The firm were very good to me, and kept me on, as having been injured, accidentally as it was supposed, in their service. And I tried to repay them by devotion to my work. In time the capacities of my two hands seemed all concentrated in the one left, and I became expert with it as I had never been with my right. Months past, and nothing happening to alarm me further, I grew by degrees to a certain confidence, and to a hope that the police had ceased to interest themselves in the matter of the thumb-marks. And then one day, all in an instant, my silly self-delusion was scattered to the winds. I received a visit in my lodgings from an enemy I had never conceived or dreamed of.” He passed a hand across his damp forehead. Gilead patted his shoulder reassuringly.