It has been an episode like a German sentence, with its predicate at the end.  Trifling incidents occurred at haphazard, as it seemed, and I never guessed they were by way of making sense.  Then, this morning, somewhat of the suddenest, came the verb and the full stop.

Yesterday I should have said there was nothing to tell; to-day there is too much.  The announcement of his death has caused me to review our relations, with the result of discovering my own part to have been that of an accessory before the fact.  I did not kill him (though, even there, I’m not sure I didn’t lend a hand), but I might have saved his life.  It is certain that he made me signals of distress—­faint, shy, tentative, but unmistakable—­and that I pretended not to understand:  just barely dipped my colours, and kept my course.  Oh, if I had dreamed that his distress was extreme—­that he was on the point of foundering and going down!  However, that doesn’t exonerate me:  I ought to have turned aside to find out.  It was a case of criminal negligence.  That he, poor man, probably never blamed me, only adds to the burden on my conscience.  He had got past blaming people, I dare say, and doubtless merely lumped me with the rest—­with the sum-total of things that made life unsupportable.  Yet, for a moment, when we first met, his face showed a distinct glimmering of hope; so perhaps there was a distinct disappointment.  He must have had so many disappointments, before it came to—­what it came to; but it wouldn’t have come to that if he had got hardened to them.  Possibly they had lost their outlines, and merged into one dull general disappointment that was too hard to bear.  I wonder whether the Priest and the Levite were smitten with remorse after they had passed on.  Unfortunately, in this instance, no good Samaritan followed.

The bottom of our long table d’hote was held by a Frenchman, a Normand, a giant, but a pallid and rather flabby giant, whose name, if he had another than Monsieur, I never heard.  He professed to be a painter, used to sketch birds and profiles on the back of his menu-card between the courses, wore shamelessly the multi-coloured rosette of a foreign order in his buttonhole, and talked with a good deal of physiognomy.  I had the corner seat at his right, and was flanked in turn by Miss Etta J. Hicks, a bouncing young person from Chicago, beyond whom, like rabbits in a company of foxes, cowered Mr. and Mrs. Jordan P. Hicks, two broken-spirited American parents.  At Monsieur’s left, and facing me, sat Colonel Escott, very red and cheerful; then a young man who called the Colonel Cornel, and came from Dublin, proclaiming himself a barr’ster, and giving his name as Flarty, though on his card it was written Flaherty; and then Sir Richard Maistre.  After him, a diminishing perspective of busy diners—­for purposes of conversation, so far as we were concerned, inhabitants of the Fourth Dimension.