Just opposite that wall, on the other side, was once a small tripe and trotter shop, kept by a most lovely daughter of the people, so fair and good in my eyes that I would have asked her to be my wife. What would she think of me now? That I should have dared to aspire! What a King Cophetua! * * * * * What does everybody think? I can never breathe the real cause to a soul. Only two women know the truth, and they will take good care not to tell. Thank Heaven for that! What matters what anybody thinks? "It will be all the same as a hundred years hence." That is the most sensible proverb ever invented. * * * * * But meanwhile! * * * * * The judge puts on the black cap, and it is all for you! Every eye is fixed on you, so big and young and strong and full of life! Ugh! * * * * * They pinion you, and you have to walk and be a man, and the chaplain exhorts and prays and tries to comfort. Then a sea of faces; people opposite, who have been eating and drinking and making merry, waiting for _you!_ A cap is pulled over your eyes--oh, horror! horror! horror! * * * * * "Heureux tambour-major de Sicile!" * * * * * "Il faut laver son ligne sale en famille, et c'est ce que j'ai fait. Mais ca va ma couter cher!" * * * * * Would I do it all over again? Oh, let me hope, yes! * * * * * Ah, he died too quick; I dealt him those four blows in less than as many seconds. It was five minutes, perhaps--or, at the most, ten--from the moment he came into the room to that when I finished him and was caught red-handed. And I--what a long agony! Oh, that I might once more dream a "true dream," and see my dear people once more! But it seems that I have lost the power of dreaming true since that fatal night. I try and try, but it will not come. My dreams are dreadful; and, oh, the _waking_! * * * * * After all, my life hitherto, but for a few happy years of childhood, has not been worth living; it is most unlikely that it ever would have been, had I lived to a hundred! Oh, Mary! Mary! * * * * * And penal servitude! Better any death than that. It is good that my secret must die with me--that there will be no extenuating circumstances, no recommendation to mercy, no commutation of the swift penalty of death. "File, file... File sa corde au bourreau!" By such monotonous thoughts, and others as dreary and hopeless, recurring again and again in the same dull round, I beguiled the terrible time that intervened between Ibbetson's death and my trial at the Old Bailey. It all seems very trivial and unimportant now--not worth recording--even hard to remember.