How she cried! I felt like a brute. Ah, I know that feeling well, but it is strange that I should have despised myself so for the first decent thing I have done since I was a laughing boy! How I love her—I who have laughed so at love. Thirty eight years of cynical disbelief against one year of absolute love. Thirty eight years, eleven months, and thirty days of disreputable life against one day of self sacrifice. That is my record. And what a sacrifice it was! To give up the woman one loves and make her despise you, that she may not suffer. How happy we could have been, but for——it was happiness to me just to sit beside her and watch her at some little womanly act, to see her smile, to know that her soul was as white as the feathers of a swan, and to say to myself, “This woman actually loves me—me, a”—pshaw, I don’t like to say the word even to myself. How sweet she was! She used to put her little hand on my head and stroke my hair and ask me what it was that worried me so much (for with her woman’s intuition she soon learned that there was something that troubled me) and I would laugh and tell her that it was the fear that some day she might cease to love me. Then she would kiss me and tell me that I need never fear such a thing as that. Then she would call me foolish and laugh and kiss me again. I can feel her faint breath on my brow now. I am sure I could have made her happy, even though I am what I am. If I could have married her I would have guarded her as carefully as the Creator guards the angels. She would never have learned even the alphabet of the black side of human life. We would have been rich and respected and happy—oh, so happy! But that man—that man with the gold rimmed spectacles whom I see everywhere, frightens me. I can feel the atmosphere of Scotland Yard about him, although he looks almost benign. If I could ever catch him looking at me, I should be satisfied that he is not what I fear. But although he seems to be everywhere I go, he apparently pays no attention to me—and therefore I know that he _has been looking at me_, and has turned away as suddenly as I have turned to look at him. It was the only thing I had to warn me. It may be after all that he has no interest in the capture of an escaped—but I could not run the risk, for her sake. After all, I am well disguised. I have changed a good deal in a year. It is nearly a month since I first noticed him, and he has evidently been unable to make up his mind yet. I suppose, too, that it is a little hard for him to believe that I could ever have been introduced into the society of the most respectable people in all New England, and be engaged to the daughter of a millionaire. Ha! Ha! These English detectives are slow—but, confound it! They—are—most—disagreeably—sure. Well—I don’t care about it now. It is almost over.