"It was I who borrowed your car--and who ran away with your junk. I am putting my address at the head of this, so that if you want it back you can come and get it. But perhaps you won't want it back. "I have a feeling that to you and your wife I am as good as dead. If you have any thought of me it is, I am sure, to pity me. Yet I rather fancy that you needn't. I am down and out, and living on ten dollars a month. That's all I got when the crash came--it is all I shall ever get. I pay four dollars a month for my room and twenty cents a day for food. Sometimes I pay less than twenty cents when I find myself in need of other--luxuries. Yet there's an adventure in it, Whiting. A good little woman who lives in this house begs me to work. But I have never worked. And why begin? I've a heritage of bad habits, and one does not wish to seem superior to one's ancestors. "The winters are the worst. I spend the summers on the open road. Ask Marion if she remembers the days when we read Stevenson together in the garden? Tell her it is like that--under the stars--Tell her that I am getting more out of it than she is--with you-- "But the winters send me back to town--and this winter Fate has brought me to an old house in a shabby street just a bit back from the Club. On the first floor there is a little family. Three kiddies and a young mother who works to keep the wolf from the door. There's a Pussy-Kiddie, and a Milly-Kiddie, and a baby, and they have adopted me as a friend. "And this Christmas I had nothing to give them--but a red candle to light their room. "When I got into your car it was just for the adventure. To breathe for a moment the air I once breathed--to fancy that Marion's ghost might sit beside me for one little moment, as she will sit beside you to the end of your days. "I have played all roles but that of robber--but when I saw the things that you had bought with Marion's money for Marion's children--it went to my head--and I wanted them in the worst way for those poor kiddies--who haven't any dolls or Christmas dinners. "I am playing Santa Claus for them to-night. I shall take the things down and leave them in their poor rooms. It will be up to you to come and take them away. It will be up to you, too, to give this note to the police and steal my freedom. "You used to be a good sport, Whiting. I have nothing against you except that you stole Marion--perhaps this will square our accounts. And if your children are, because of me, without their dolls to-morrow, you can remember this, that the kiddies are happy below stairs--since Dick Turpin dwells aloft!