Ch. 11: A Terrible Temptation

I hate looking back and reading words which I have written when the printer's devil was waiting for copy in the hall, but I fancy I have somewhere called this tale a confession; if not, I meant to do so. It has no more claim to be called a work of art than the cheapest penny dreadful. How could it?

It holds but two characters, a man and a woman.

All the rest are the merest supers. Perhaps you may wonder that I thus anticipate criticism; but review-writing is so easy that I may just as well fill up with this as with any other kind of padding.

My publisher insists on so many pages of copy. When he does not get what he wants, the language rich and powerful enough to serve his needs has yet to be invented.

But he struggles on with the help of a dictionary of American expletives.

However, we are coming to the conclusion, and that, I think, will waken the public up! And yet this chapter will be a short one. It will be the review of a struggle against a temptation to commit, not perhaps crime, but an act of the grossest bad taste.

To that temptation I succumbed; we both succumbed.

It is a temptation to which I dare think poor human nature has rarely been subjected.

The temptation to go and see a man, a fellow-creature, tried for a crime which one's wife committed, and to which one is an accessory after the fact.

Oh, that morning!

How well I remember it.

Breakfast was just oyer, the table with its relics of fragrant bloaters and terrine of paté still stood in the patio.

I was alone. I loafed lazily and at my ease.

Then I lighted a princely havanna, blaming myself for profaning the scented air from el Cuadro de Leicester.

You see I have such a sensitive aesthetic conscience.

Then I took from my pocket the Sporting Times, and set listlessly to work to skim its lengthy columns.

This was owing to my vow to Philippa, that I would read every journal published in England. As the day went on, I often sat with them up to my shoulders, and littering all the patio.

I ran down the topics of the day. This scene is an 'under-study,' by the way, of the other scene in which I read of the discovery of Sir Runan's hat. At last I turned my attention to the provincial news column. A name, a familiar name, caught my eye; the name of one who, I had fondly fancied, had: long-lain unburied in my cellar at the 'pike. My princely havanna fell unheeded on the marble pavement of the patio, as with indescribable amazement I read the following 'par.'

'William Evans, the man accused of the murder of Sir Runan Errand, will be tried at the Newnham Assizes on the 20th. The case, which excites considerable interest among the élite of Boding and district, will come on the tapis the first day of the meeting. The evidence will be of a purely circumstantial kind.'

Every