that would inevitably follow. I had hoped to escape, with the firm intention of never resting until I had made restitution for the only crime that has ever stained my life; but it was not to be. The appearance, at the moment of departure, of a man upon whose blind confidence and dull apprehension I had relied, for such a tardy discovery of my betrayal of trust as would give me ample time for escape, has told me that the cable would assuredly carry the intelligence abroad long before I could reach English soil.
I had at first no intention of leaving New York. I expected, with incredible fatuity, to delay exposure until some lucky chance should permit me to cover, for all time, the traces of my wrong-doing; but the mental strain consequent upon continued and complicated falsifying of accounts, became unendurable, and in an evil moment I appropriated certain funds from a quarter where immediate examination and discovery were improbable, and ventured all upon that mirage of defaulters—faro. I lost. There was no time for resort to the expedients of disguise and
