I have been looking at these pages over again. I wrote them at the time when the things happened, and that is years ago; yet they all seem but yesterday. It seems but yesterday that Minnie Saxe brought to me, in the days of my extreme poverty and hunger, six kippers, fat and well-liking. It seems but yesterday that I stepped out on the platform at Charing Cross station and drove from there with the man whom I had never met in my life in order that I might personate a dead woman. And now? And now, right away in the country, it is all very quiet but for the voices of two small children overhead. Even as I write this I am interrupted by a grave man of imperturbable mien--a man who may possibly have seen a joke in the servants’ hall, but has never permitted himself to see one outside of it. He announces, with the utmost solemnity, “Master Bernard desired me to say, m’lady, that the head of the toy duck has come off, and he would be glad if your ladyship would step upstairs and see about it.” “Thanks, Jenkins,” I said. “Tell him I’m coming.” THE END WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH