"'I trust God will forgive me. I am not afraid to die, I am afraid to live and face it. I cannot do E. this wrong. Please, dear mother, think of me as I used to be. I have tried and tried, but it is all no good, and I am better out of the world. Give my love to everybody, and try, dear mother, to forgive me.'" "Time!" Archie leaned back in his chair. "Phew! Was that five minutes? Seemed short," he said. "Just a breather before we transcribe." He lighted a cigarette. "I say, Jeff: do you know any dealer who gives a decent price for second-hand clothes? I've heaps here I sha'n't want any more." I had small use for such a dealer. "You might try Lamb's Conduit Street," I said. "I've bought clothes there." "Silly ass----I didn't mean that!" He was now monstrously careful of my feelings. "Say when you're ready to transcribe," I said, pushing across a wad of paper. "All right, let's get it over. I'll race you! Ready?" We plunged into our longhand transcription. "Ah!" I said, twenty minutes later. "Beat you, Archie!" He was racing through his last paragraph. "Not by much, you haven't," he said, and then, following our practice with exercises at the college, "No you haven't--you haven't signed--hooray!" he cried, dashing in his signature and looking at his watch. "Thirty-two minutes--pretty smart, what?" An hour later I left, with his exercise as well as my own slipped between the leaves of Smillie's "Balance of Trade"--one of the text-books he had given me. My hypothetical case was now completely prepared. * * * * * And now I spared no effort to save him. When it is yours to slay or to spare, you have in a sense slain even in sparing, for a life has been yours, even as Archie Merridew's life lay in the folds of that signed sheet of paper. I carried that signed paper in my breast pocket on the day of the breaking-up party to Richmond. It had not been my intention to go to this picnic, for the sufficient reason that I was penniless _pas le sou_--but once more Kitty, to whom I had told some tale or other about pressing work, had broken out upon me. "Oh yes--of course--I might have known!" she had cried, doubtless knowing that "pressure of work" tale of old from Frank and Alf. "Oh yes--it was quite enough that I should set my heart on it and I might have known you'd be busy or something! Busy!" Her scornful little laugh had set me tingling: I--busy! But I had already seen that I should have to go. It had only remained for me to climb down to the level of Frank and Alf in the easiest possible way. "Don't carry on like that, Kitty," I had said shortly. "It isn't so much the work; the fact is I'd like to go; but I can't very well ask them to pay me for the work before it's done, and the fact is I've rather miscalculated this week. It will be all right next week, of course."