Glove Lane Murder!...  Suicide and confession of brother of well-known K.C....  Well-known K.C.’s brother....  Murder and suicide....  Paiper!” Was he to let loose that flood of foulness?  Was he, who had done nothing, to smirch his own little daughter’s life; to smirch his dead brother, their dead mother—­himself, his own valuable, important future?  And all for a sewer rat!  Let him hang, let the fellow hang if he must!  And that was not certain.  Appeal!  Petition!  He might—­he should be saved!  To have got thus far, and then, by his own action, topple himself down!

With a sudden darting movement he thrust the confession in among the burning coals.  And a smile licked at the folds in his dark face, like those flames licking the sheets of paper, till they writhed and blackened.  With the toe of his boot he dispersed their scorched and crumbling wafer.  Stamp them in!  Stamp in that man’s life!  Burnt!  No more doubts, no more of this gnawing fear!  Burnt?  A man—­an innocent-sewer rat!  Recoiling from the fire he grasped his forehead.  It was burning hot and seemed to be going round.

Well, it was done!  Only fools without will or purpose regretted.  And suddenly he laughed.  So Larry had died for nothing!  He had no will, no purpose, and was dead!  He and that girl might now have been living, loving each other in the warm night, away at the other end of the world, instead of lying dead in the cold night here!  Fools and weaklings regretted, suffered from conscience and remorse.  A man trod firmly, held to his purpose, no matter what!

He went to the window and drew back the curtain.  What was that?  A gibbet in the air, a body hanging?  Ah!  Only the trees—­the dark trees—­the winter skeleton trees!  Recoiling, he returned to his armchair and sat down before the fire.  It had been shining like that, the lamp turned low, his chair drawn up, when Larry came in that afternoon two months ago.  Bah!  He had never come at all!  It was a nightmare.  He had been asleep.  How his head burned!  And leaping up, he looked at the calendar on his bureau.  “January the 28th!” No dream!  His face hardened and darkened.  On!  Not like Larry!  On! 1914.

A STOIC

I

1

         “Aequam memento rebus in arduis
          Servare mentem:”—­Horace.

In the City of Liverpool, on a January day of 1905, the Board-room of “The Island Navigation Company” rested, as it were, after the labours of the afternoon.  The long table was still littered with the ink, pens, blotting-paper, and abandoned documents of six persons—­a deserted battlefield of the brain.  And, lonely, in his chairman’s seat at the top end old Sylvanus Heythorp sat, with closed eyes, still and heavy as an image.  One puffy, feeble hand, whose fingers quivered, rested on the arm of his chair; the thick white hair on his massive head glistened in the light from a green-shaded lamp.  He was not asleep, for every now and then his sanguine cheeks filled, and a sound, half sigh, half grunt, escaped his thick lips between a white moustache and the tiny tuft of white hairs above his cleft chin.  Sunk in the chair, that square thick trunk of a body in short black-braided coat seemed divested of all neck.