I write this record of a strange chapter in my life with a double motive. It may serve, firstly, as a warning to others who find themselves placed in what I once regarded as my enviable position. Secondly, it ought to have a wider usefulness in opening people's eyes to the very real dangers that lurk under the surface of London life. Had anyone told me, two years ago, that a man living in peaceful England could be in daily danger of assassination at the hands of an organized gang of villains, I should have found no words strong enough to express my disbelief. Still less would I have supposed that I, Cecil Addington, a strong, vigorous young Englishman, would ever go about in constant dread of murderous violence. Many who read my story will treat it as the outcome of a disordered imagination and refuse to believe that the forces of civilization are powerless to protect a man whose death has been deliberately planned. I wish I could share this belief; but, unfortunately, my experience points the other way. I have come to know that there are to-day, in London, men who would not hesitate to commit murder if it could be done without undue risk to themselves, and who have enough devilish ingenuity to reduce that risk almost to vanishing-point. But I had better begin at the beginning and tell my story simply and straightforwardly, just as it happened, merely warning the reader that, though I am relating actual facts, I have, for obvious reasons, used fictitious names. In May, 1906, having got away from Cambridge for a few days, I was enjoying myself in town. I was doing it in a very small way and under a sense of injustice, for I had nothing like the means at my disposal that I considered my due. In six months' time, on reaching my majority, I was to come into possession of thirty thousand pounds under my mother's will, and yet I had still to get along as best I might on a poor undergraduate's allowance from my father. He and I did not hit it off at all well. I was rather stage-struck, and had made up my mind that an actor's life was the life for me. He did not see it in that light, and was dead set on getting me into the Foreign Office, where, he argued, I could use my money and 'Varsity education to some purpose. If I had not been rather "green," and, I may as well admit, headstrong, I might have seen that he was right. Anyhow, we quarrelled, and he decided that, though he could not prevent me from committing what he called social suicide when I became my own master, he would at any rate put the financial screw on as long as he could. The result was that I found myself tied down to the smallest possible allowance, continued only on condition that I remained at Cambridge. I was plainly told, moreover, that if I were fool enough to throw up everything and go on the stage, I should have to exist as best I could. This gave me "furiously to think," as they say in France. I had sense enough to realize that budding actors do not fall on their feet at