CHAPTER XIII I FACE THE WORLD AGAIN Of all that I must write of my life, as it faced me after those tragic happenings, certain pictures rise up in my mind, not easily to be effaced. I who write this am poor and old, yet not broken nor downcast any more. For, by the great grace of God, I am not alone; there is one with me, whose tender loving eyes look always at me, with no remembrance of any defects or frailties--with no recollection of anything I may have done that would have been so much better left undone. Of the pictures that rise before me as I look back, the first is that of being absolutely alone in London, with the fear of death upon me. The fear of death--because the man Jervis Fanshawe had killed lay hidden behind a frail wooden door, that might at any moment be broken down; thereafter I was to expect search to be made for a certain servant named Tinman, sometime Charles Avaline, condemned to death twenty years before for murder. Yet, strangely enough, that never happened. I have the memory before me now of a day when I walked the streets, and was faced suddenly by a newspaper placard, flaring with the announcement--"Murder of an unknown man in Lincoln's Inn Fields." Thereafter I saw other placards--this one startlingly vivid with a clue, this one hopeless. And I even had the temerity to stand in a little stuffy Coroner's court, what time twelve good men and true brought in a verdict of murder against some person or persons unknown. More than that, I stood one bitter winter evening beside a pauper grave in a cemetery, and knew that the newly turned earth covered all that was mortal of Murray Olivant. Another picture rises in my mind--so near to the other that it seems to be part of it. I remember that on this occasion I was in a poor eating-house in a poor neighbourhood of London; I was looking through the columns of a newspaper that was a day or two old. A man as poor as I was is necessarily a little behind the times; news filters through to him slowly enough. And looking down the columns of this paper I came across an item of news that was startling:--