"You were kind to me four years ago, as kind as Sir Henry Royson would permit you to be towards one who had wilfully and irreparably insulted him. My feelings with regard to him have undergone no change. He may be dead, for all I know, or care. But you, I suppose, are still the trusted solicitor of the Cuddesham estate, and Sir Henry Royson, if alive, may have remained unmarried. In that event, I am heir to a barren title, and it may save you some trouble if I inform you that I am leaving England. For reasons of no consequence, I am passing under the name of Richard King. If I return, or settle down in some other land, I will write to you, say, after the lapse of a year. Please regard this note as strictly private, and do not interpret it as foreshadowing any attempt on my part to arrive at a reconciliation with Sir Henry Royson." He was about to add the briefest announcement of his new career, but he checked himself; had not von Kerber forbidden the giving of any information? He signed the letter, and addressed it to the senior partner of a firm of solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Then, indeed, he felt that he had snapped the last slender link that bound him to the dull life of the city. Like Kent, he vowed that "freedom lies hence, and banishment is here." And he had always hated Brixton, which was unjust to that pleasant suburb, but the days of his sojourn there had been days of bondage. He was among the first to secure a seat in the Continental mail. Having registered those superb trunks through to Marseilles, and reserved a comfortable corner by depositing his valise there, he strolled up and down the platform, and quietly scrutinized his fellow passengers. So far as he could judge, none of the earlier arrivals were prospective shipmates. Two bronzed men, of free gait, with that trick of carrying the hands back to front which singles out the sailor from the rest of humanity, drew him like a lodestone. But he soon discovered that they were P. & O. officers, bidding farewell to a friend bound for Egypt.