ed a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and brought
out the enclosure. Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was
clipt to silence. It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled
me with an odd feeling of uncanniness, and I shivered slightly.

"Bah!" I said to myself determinedly. "There is a shrewd nip in the wind,
for all the show of sunlight;" and I rose, pulled down the window, and
resumed my seat.

Then in the closed room, that had become deathly quiet by contrast, I
opened and read the dead man's letter.

* * * * *

"Sir,--I hope you will read what I here put down. I lay it on you as a
solemn injunction, for I am a dying man, and I know it. And to who is
my death due, and the Governor's death, if not to you, for your pryin'
and curiosity, as surely as if you had drove a nife through our harts?
Therefore, I say, Read this, and take my burden from me, for it has been
a burden; and now it is right that you that interfered should have it on
your own mortal shoulders. The Major is dead and I am dying, and in the
first of my fit it went on in my head like cimbells that the trap was
left open, and that if he passed he would look in and _it_ would get him.
For he knew not fear, neither would he submit to bullying by God or
devil.

"Now I will tell you the truth, and Heaven quit you of your
responsibility in our destruction.

"There wasn't another man to me like the Governor in all the countries of
the world. Once he brought me to life after doctors had given me up for
dead; but he willed it, and I lived; and ever afterwards I loved him as a
dog loves its master. That was in the Punjab; and I came home to England
with him, and was his servant when he got his appointment to the jail
here. I tell you he was a proud and fierce man, but under control and
tender to those he favoured; and I will tell you also a strange thing
about him. Though he was a soldier and an officer, and strict in
discipline as made men fear and admire him, his heart at bottom was all
for books, and literature, and such-like gentle crafts. I had his
confidence, as a man gives his confidence to his dog, and before me
sometimes he unbent as he never would before others. In this way I learnt
the bitter sorrow of his life. He had once hoped to be a poet,
acknowledged as such before the world. He was by natur' an idelist, as
they call it, and God knows what it meant to him to come out of the