Then a sound like the hissing of a thousand cisterns filled my ears. Through it I heard Kitty Windus's scream of terror, but it sounded an infinite distance away. From Evie I had heard nothing. For one moment I saw everything reel and aslant--Kato, the Schmerveloffians on the sofa, the cistern-post with its hats and coats and one hook empty, steeving up towards a tilted ceiling.... Then came the blow on the back of my head, and the sounds of the cistern ceased. I had fallen across Aunt Angela's tiled hearth, and lay in a cloud of steam from the kettle I had overturned in my fall. PART IV IDDESLEIGH GATE I It is against the advice of my doctors that I have written these last pages--these last chapters in fact--at all. But I wrote them only a very little at a time, after I came back from Hastie's place in Scotland. And I went to Scotland only after I came back from Egypt. But I am back at the Consolidation now, having missed nearly a year, and I really don't think that this private writing tires me too much. I admit that it seems odd that I should wish to do it at all, and doubly odd that I should have kept, not one private record, but two.[2] I thought I had finished when the first one came to an end. Then I found I hadn't. Let me say quite plainly, however, that the second one is no retractation of the first. There is not a single statement in that first writing from which I recede. I stand by every word of it. I wrote there, for example, that I did not fear to be left alone in my library at night; and that is true. I wrote that there glided no shadowy shape by my side when I stepped into my brougham or passed between the saluting commissionaires in Pall Mall; and that also is true. It is true that I play with my clean-born children, both of them, and still do not pardon even the meditation of that old crime that would have made the life of her I love an abhorrence worse than death. These things are as true now as when I first wrote them, and I shall die without regret for them. But the impulse that drives a man to write about himself at all still remains a curious thing. I don't find it an inexplicable one--but as I shall return to this by-and-by, I will leave it for the present. Let me say this, however, now; that whatever cares may or may not weigh on me, I neither consider myself on my defence nor yet join hands with Schmerveloff and his crew in their sweeping and futile denunciations of the whole Scheme of Things as they are. If I cannot stand alone I can at least fall alone, and I haven't fallen yet.