Precisely what he did with them only he and I know; but I don’t mind saying that L3000 did not buy my first serial rights.  Then came second and third rights, and after them the book rights, British, American, and Colonial.  Then came the translation rights.  In French, my creation is, of course, as in English, Martin Renard; in German he is Martin Fuchs; and by a similar process you can put him—­my translators have put him—­into Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, and three-fourths of the tongues of Europe.  And this was the first series only.  It was only with the second series that the full splendour of my success appeared.  My very imitators grew rich; my agent’s income from his comparatively small percentage on my royalties was handsome; and he chuckled and bade me wait for the dramatic rights and the day when the touring companies should get to business....

I had “got there.”

And I remember, sadly enough now, my first resolution when the day came when I was able to survey the situation with anything approaching calm.  It was, “Enough.”  For the rest of my days I need not know poverty again.  Thenceforward I need not, unless I chose, do any but worthy work. Martin Renard had served his purpose handsomely, and I intended to have nothing more to do with him.

Then came that dazzling offer for the second series....

I accepted it.

I accepted the third likewise; and I have told you about the fourth....

I have tried to kill Martin Renard.  He was killing me.  I have, in the pages of the Falchion, actually killed him; but I have had to resuscitate him.  I cannot escape from him....

I am not setting down one word more of this than bears directly on my tale of Andriaovsky’s “Life.”  For those days, when my whole future had hung in the balance, were the very days covered by that portion of Andriaovsky’s life at which I had now arrived.  I had reached, and was hesitating at, our point of divergence.  Those checks and releases which I had at first found so unaccountable corresponded with the vicissitudes of the Martin Renard negotiations.

The actual dates did not, of course, coincide—­I had quickly discovered the falsity of that scent.  Neither did the intervals between them, with the exception of those few days in which I had been unable to complete that half-written sentence—­the few days immediately prior to my (parallel) acceptance by the Falchion.  But, by that other reckoning of time, of mental and spiritual experience, they tallied exactly.  The gambling chances of five years ago meant present stumblings and haltings; the breach of faith of an editor long since meant a present respite; and another week should bring me to that point of my so strangely reduplicated experience that, allowing for the furious mental rate at which I was now living, would make another node with that other point in the more slowly lived past that had marked my acceptance of the offer for the second half-dozen of the Martin Renards.