But before I resume I must say a few words of myself.  No reader can gather the true moral of this narrative who does not take into account the effect which the cruel death of my parents had wrought on me.  From the day of the wreck hate had been my constant companion, cherished and nursed in my heart until it held complete mastery over all other passions.  I lived, so I told myself over and over again, but to avenge, to seek Simon Colliver high and low until I held him at my mercy.  Thousands of times I rehearsed the scene of our meeting, and always I held the knife which stabbed my father.  In my waking thoughts, in my dreams, I was always pursuing, and Colliver for ever fleeing before me.  In every crowd I seemed to watch for his face alone, at every street-corner to listen for his voice—­that face, that voice, which I should know among thousands.  I had read De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater,” and the picture of his unresting search for his lost Ann somehow seized upon my imagination.  Night after night it was to Oxford Street that my devil drove me:  night after night I paced the “never-ending terraces,” as did the opium-eater, on my tireless quest—­but with feelings how different!  To me it was but one long thirst of hatred, the long avenues of gaslight vistas of an avenging hell, all the multitudinous sounds of life but the chorus of that song to which my footsteps trod—­

    “Sing ho! but he waits for you.”

To London had Simon Colliver come, and somewhere, some day, he would be mine.  Until that day I sought a living face in a city of dead men, and down that illimitable slope to Holborn, and back again, I would tramp until the pavements were silent and deserted, then seek my lodging and throw myself exhausted on the bed.

In a dingy garret, looking out, when its grimy panes allowed, above one of the many squalid streets that feed the main artery of the Strand, my story begins anew.  The furniture of the room relieves me of the task of word-painting, being more effectively described by catalogue, after the manner of the ships at Troy.  It consisted of two small beds, one rickety washstand, one wooden chair, and one tin candlestick.  At the present moment this last held a flickering dip, for it was ten o’clock on the night of May the ninth, eighteen hundred and sixty-three.  On the chair sat Tom, turning excitedly the leaves of a prodigiously imposing manuscript.  I was sitting on the edge of the bed nearest the candle, brooding on my hate as usual.

Fortune had evidently dealt us some rough knocks.  We were dressed, as Tom put it, to suit the furniture, and did it to a nicety.  We were fed, according to the same authority, above our income; but not often.  I also quote Tom in saying that we were living rather fast:  we certainly saw no long prospect before us.  In short, matters had reached a crisis.

Tom looked up from his reading.

“Do you know, Jasper, I could wish that our wash-stand had not a hole cut in it to receive the basin.  It sounds hyper-critical.  But really it prejudices me in the eyes of the managers.  There’s a suspicious bulge in the middle of the paper that is damning.”