feeling for him, and nimble pressmen even then indicting paragraphs that should hound him to the gibbet. His new extremity made him the more appreciate this touching tribute. He could not understand why so many persons were so strangely kind to him. He was not aware that there was a something generous in himself which excited the generosity of others possessing that quality. He only knew that of all his like experiences he ranked this first. And then he began wondering what the waggoner would give to recall his crown and his kindness when he came to know the apparent truth.
It was so apparent that from the first he despaired of ever disproving it, and felt his only chance to lie in flight. To fly and hide was not only his first instinct, but his comparatively mature judgment in the matter. His stick had been used. He had told people that he intended so to use it himself. He would never be believed about the watch; the paper that alone could prove his word had been stolen with everything else from the dead man’s pocket. Even supposing he had started with a case, he must have spoilt it by his incriminating conduct at the hackney-coachman’s. Yet flight had been and was still his only chance. Innocent as the dead in the grave, as the child in the womb, he was still compelled to choose between a guilty hiding and a surrender tantamount to certain death.
These thoughts did not all come together, nor in this order. They were interspersed with white-hot memories of poor Blaydes as last seen in the moonlight; of that touch of dignity and of regret that read now as a premonition of his immediate end; and these in their turn were interrupted by visions of a repulsive face, and by the unseen flight of headlong, shambling feet. Perhaps
