I walked back to my rooms with a springing step.  So happy was I that I should have liked to dance down Piccadilly.  If the Faculty had not made their pronouncement, I could have no more turned poor Latimer’s earth from hell to heaven than I could have changed St. Paul’s Cathedral into a bumblebee.  The mere possibility of lending him the money would not have occurred to me.

A man of modest fortune does not go about playing Monte Cristo.  He gives away a few guineas in charity; but he keeps the bulk of his fortune to himself.  The death sentence, I vow, has compensations.  It enables a man to play Monte Cristo or any other avatar of Providence with impunity, and to-day I have discovered it to be the most fascinating game in the world.

When Latimer recovers his equilibrium and regards the transaction in the dry light of reason, he will diagnose a sure symptom of megalomania, and will pity me in his heart for a poor devil.

I have seen Eleanor Faversham, and she has released me from my engagement with such grace, dignity, and sweet womanliness that I wonder how I could have railed at her thousand virtues.

“It’s honourable of you to give me this opportunity of breaking it off, Simon,” she said, “but I care enough for you to be willing to take my chance of illness.”

“You do care for me?” I asked.

She raised astonished eyes.  “If I didn’t, do you suppose I should have engaged myself to you?  If I married you I should swear to cherish you in sickness and in health.  Why won’t you let me?”

I was in a difficulty.  To say that I was in ill-health and about to resign my seat in Parliament and a slave to doctor’s orders was one thing; it was another to tell her brutally that I had received my death warrant.  She would have taken it much more to heart than I do.

The announcement would have been a shock.  It would have kept the poor girl awake of nights.  She would have been for ever seeing the hand of Death at my throat.  Every time we met she would have noted on my face, in my gait, infallible signs of my approaching end.  I had not the right to inflict such intolerable pain on one so near and dear to me.

Besides, I am vain enough to want to walk forth somewhat gallantly into eternity; and while I yet live I particularly desire that folks should not regard me as half-dead.  I defy you to treat a man who is only going to live twenty weeks in the same pleasant fashion as you would a man who has the run of life before him.

There is always an instinctive shrinking from decay.  I should think that corpses must feel their position acutely.

It was entirely for Eleanor’s sake that I refrained from taking her into my confidence.  To her question I replied that I had not the right to tie her for life to a helpless valetudinarian.  “Besides,” said I, “as my health grows worse my jokes will deteriorate, until I am reduced to grinning through a horse-collar at the doctor.  And you couldn’t stand that, could you?”