"I laid my plans very carefully. I converted a sufficient amount of stock into cash; I made my will, leaving everything to the establishment of a certain kind of night refuge in London for the homeless, wherever they were most needed; and then I disappeared. This was not difficult. I took a passage to America. Between Liverpool and Queenstown I shaved off my long beard and moustache and changed my clothes. At Queenstown I left my stateroom, after depositing a last letter on the table, and went ashore among a crowd of other passengers. There I took train at once and was soon in London again, where I shipped for Australia and the South Seas. Meanwhile, that had happened on the steamer which I had foreseen. My stateroom was not opened until some hours after the vessel was on her way to America, and the contents of the letter there led people to assume that I had jumped overboard. I was therefore dead. A sufficient time having elapsed, the courts officially presumed my death, my estate was wound up, and I was a thing of the past. Any reasonably careful man can disappear still, in spite of Marconi and all the other modern obstacles, provided he has not committed a crime. And it was easier then." "Were the night refuges built?" I asked. "Oh yes," he said. "I have slept in one. A most curious experience. "Arrived in Sydney I opened a banking account in my new name, made some investments, and passed on to the South Seas, where, for fifteen years, I lived a calm life, succeeding commercially, as I was bound to do, and happier perhaps than not, although happiness was never in my grasp, nor could it be. Then gradually the desire once more to be in London became very powerful; while an absolute mania seized me again to see pictures. Particularly one picture. That it would be safe, I felt sure, for I was much changed and had had few intimate friends at any time." He paused, tired with his effort, and lay still. "I must tell you," he continued, "that I had been not only a great lover of pictures wherever they were to be seen, but a collector too. At the time of my disappearance I had one of the best small private collections in the country. Such, however, had been my disgust with life that it included these pictures too, and in my rage and haste to have broken with everything, I was ready to break with them as well, and my will gave instructions for all my pictures to be sold save one little jewel of paint, the very gem of the collection--a small Madonna which has been attributed to Verrocchio--and this I left to the National Gallery. It was this picture that I felt I must at any risk again see. I therefore sold my South Sea business, wound up my affairs, and returned to London, again a rich man, finding a lodging in this house. That was seven years ago.