Having tracked me to the hotel at Lowhaven, the police were somewhat at a loss. They utterly failed to establish the fact that I had any poison in my possession at that time. They then threw themselves with ardour into the details of Ughtred Gascoyne’s death. Here, again, although it was possible to show that I was not infrequently at his flat late at night, their most strenuous efforts could not prove that I was there on the night on which the fire had taken place. I was sure that suspicion about this began to creep into my wife’s mind. Perhaps she had learned that the Parsons were fictitious individuals. It may also have struck her that I must have passed the road where her brother was found dead, earlier on the same evening. These two facts, taken together with my being in the same hotel with young Gascoyne when he died, and as much evidence as could be raked up against me in connection with Ughtred Gascoyne’s death, must have forged a chain of implication which could not but shake the most serene confidence. Not that I had the least fear of her acting in a hostile manner. She could not have done anything had she wished to; besides, she belonged to that class of woman who, possessing most of the virtues, would never drag her husband’s name in the dust. Her conscience might—had she been questioned—have triumphed, but that she would speak out of her own free will I did not believe. As the day of the trial drew nearer and nearer without any new charge my confidence rose. I suppose this optimism lies at the back of every prisoner’s mind. The possibility of an acquittal probably never disappears till the foreman of the jury delivers the terrible word guilty, a word which has a leaden sound complementary to the deadliness of its meaning. My wife came to see me the day before the trial, and though she strove hard against the awful horror that I could see was in her mind, the strain was at last telling on her. She was taken away in a dead faint. I was sorry for her. I knew it was the last thing she would have wished should happen. My own danger had driven all three women out of my mind, and it was a psychological point which interested me extremely. I had loved them so fervently; and I could love fervently, even if not on the highest level. My own position, however, was so enormously important in my eyes that they were quite dwarfed. I could not rouse myself to any degree of emotion over their sufferings. It was not the idea of losing them that predominated in my mind, nor the idea of dwelling in their memory as a thing for pity, the victim of a terrible and gloomy death. I regret to say that my departure for London, considered as a spectacle, was a failure.