“I had better warn you at the start that you will find it hard to believe the things I am going to tell you. You know already of two crises in the lives of my Hispano-Kentish yeomen, two crises which I think have puzzled you sufficiently—though in the first case I suspect that you were more clear-sighted than I—but in this third crisis with which I deal you will probably refuse to believe altogether. I do not pretend to explain it myself. I only know that it happened, and therefore that it is true. Were it not true, I would not dare to foist its relation on any living man, however credulous. Human ingenuity could not, however, have planned this sequel, nor human courage have invented a solution at once so subtle and so naïf, and so in the absurd incredulity of my tale I place my reliance that it will carry conviction. “Ours has been a queer friendship, but one which has held great value for me; I think many people would be better for such a friendship in their lives. Of course, to make it ideal, I should never have seen you; picked your name and address out of a telephone directory, and written; I am sure you would have answered. Then I should have had no reserve towards you, not that I have much now, but you see I never can be certain that I am not going to meet you in a train or in the street, when my ideally unknown correspondent and I could pass by without recognition, but when you and I would have to stop, and shake hands, and a host of intimate, remembered phrases would come crowding up to people our silence. I dislike such embarrassments. I find that solitude, like leprosy, grows upon one with age, for I observe myself physically wincing from the idea that I might possibly meet you as I have said, in a train or in the street. “You will be surprised, after this, to hear that I no longer live alone. But I shall not give you the pleasure of anticipating the end of what I have set out to tell you; I am going to roll my story off my pen for my own delectation far more than for yours, and to see whether in the telling I cannot chance upon the explanation of various points which are still obscure.