“One thing I envy you—­you’ll be alive to see the rage of the sheep.  I am playing this hand alone and without help.  So when your silly newspapers begin to cry out about secret societies, you will know.  I never belonged to one in my life.

“I think I am sorriest about the way you’ll think of me.  But that makes no real difference, because I know it to be foolish.  I have the stuff on board and the little machine.  I cannot fix the time to an hour up or down; but you may take it for sure that some time between 10 p.m. and midnight the Berenice will be at the bottom of the sea with

   “Yours, P. C.”

While John Gilbart read this there was silence in the stuffy little room, and for some minutes after.  Then he stepped to the mantelpiece for the match-box and candle.  A small ormolu clock ticked there, and while he groped for the matches he put out a hand to stop the noise, which had suddenly grown intolerable.  He desisted, remembering that he did not know how the clock worked—­that Mrs. Wilcox, who wound it up religiously on Monday mornings, was proud of it, and—­anyway, that wasn’t the machine he wanted to stop.  He found a match, lit it and held it close to the letter.

The match burned low, scorched his fingers.  He dropped it in the fender, where it flickered out, just missing the “waterfall” of shavings with which Mrs. Wilcox decorated her fireplace in the summer months.  He did not light another, but went back to the window and stood there, quite still.

Down the street to the westward, over the wet roofs still glimmering in the twilight, one pale green rift divided the heavy clouds, and in that rift the last of the daylight was dying.  Across the way, in the house facing him, a woman was lighting a lamp.  As a rule the inhabitants of Prospect Place did not draw the blinds of their upper rooms until they closed the shutters also and went to bed:  and Gilbart looked straight into the little parlour.  But he saw nothing.

He was trying—­vainly trying—­to bring his mind to it.  Nothing really big had happened to him before:  and his first feeling, characteristically selfish, was that this terrible thing had risen up to alter all the rest of his life.  He must disentangle himself, get away to a distance and have a look at it.  His brain was buzzing.  Yes, there it rose, like a black wall between this moment and all the hours to come; a brute barrier stretching clean across the prospect.  Again and again he brought his mind up to it as you might coax a horse up to a fence; again and again it refused.  Each time in the last few steps his heart froze, extending its chill until every separate faculty hung back springless and inert.  And there was no getting round!