“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at 2 pounds a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still.  It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers.  Only one man knew my secret.  He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town.  This fellow, a Lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my secret was safe in his possession.

“Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of money.  I do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn 700 pounds a year—­which is less than my average takings—­but I had exceptional advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which improved by practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City.  All day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very bad day in which I failed to take 2 pounds.

“As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the country, and eventually married, without anyone having a suspicion as to my real occupation.  My dear wife knew that I had business in the City.  She little knew what.

“Last Monday I had finished for the day and was dressing in my room above the opium den when I looked out of my window and saw, to my horror and astonishment, that my wife was standing in the street, with her eyes fixed full upon me.  I gave a cry of surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and, rushing to my confidant, the Lascar, entreated him to prevent anyone from coming up to me.  I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that she could not ascend.  Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on those of a beggar, and put on my pigments and wig.  Even a wife’s eyes could not pierce so complete a disguise.  But then it occurred to me that there might be a search in the room, and that the clothes might betray me.  I threw open the window, reopening by my violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in the bedroom that morning.  Then I seized my coat, which was weighted by the coppers which I had just transferred to it from the leather bag in which I carried my takings.  I hurled it out of the window, and it disappeared into the Thames.  The other clothes would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of constables up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather, I confess, to my relief, that instead of being identified as Mr. Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as his murderer.

“I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain.  I was determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and hence my preference for a dirty face.  Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off my ring and confided it to the Lascar at a moment when no constable was watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause to fear.”