. I had my chance again--a chance gained for me beyond
hope by that counsel but for whom I should be sleeping to-night in
the condemned cell; a chance, and a good chance, but for that same
cursed lawyer. Ugh! how cold it was, and how I hated _him_ for it!

There was a little whitewashed cottage on the edge of the moorland
just after the hedgerows ceased--the last house before the barren
heath began, standing a full three hundred yards from any other
dwelling. Its front faced the road, and at the back an outhouse and
a wretched garden jutted out on the waste land. There was a light in
each of its windows tonight, and as I passed down the road I heard
the dismal music of a flute.

Perhaps it was this that jogged my thoughts and woke them up to my
present pass. At any rate, I had not gone more than twenty yards
before I turned and made for the door. The people might give me a
night's lodging in the outhouse; at any rate, they would not refuse a
crust to stay the fast which I had not broken since the morning.
I tapped gently with my knuckles on the door, and listened.

I waited five minutes, and no one answered. The flute still
continued its melancholy tune; it was evidently in the hands of a
learner, for the air (a dispiriting one enough at the best) kept
breaking off suddenly and repeating itself. But the performer had
patience, and the sound never ceased for more than two seconds at a
time. Besides this, nothing could be heard. The blinds were drawn
in all the windows. The glow of the candles through them was
cheerful enough, but nothing could be seen of the house inside.
I knocked a second time, and a third, with the same result.
Finally, tired of this, I pushed open the low gate which led into the
garden behind, and stole round to the back of the cottage.

Here, too, the window on the ground floor was lit up behind its
blinds, but that of the room above was shuttered. There was a hole
in the shutter, however, where a knot of the wood had fallen out, and
a thin shaft of light stretched across the blackness and buried
itself in a ragged yew-tree at the end of the garden. From the
loudness of the sounds I judged this to be the room where the
flute-playing was going on. The crackling of my footsteps on the
thin soil did not disturb the performer, so I gathered a handful of
earth and pitched it up against the pane. The flute stopped for a
minute or so, but just as I was expecting to see the shutter open,