him.

"No need to shoot. The poor beggar's dead--been run over by a motor-car,
I should say. It's a lucky accident."

"I wonder," said Richard.

"Wonder what?"

"Wonder if it was really an accident."

WHEN I WAS KING

I was in a part of the country where it is a good deal safer to kill a
child than to take a pheasant. There are more people to look after the
pheasants. I have always felt as if a man who could get his bird without
a gun and cook it without a kitchen had a kind of right to the bird. An
empty stomach is an argument too. Well, I got my bird, and then Bates
got me. He is a big man and can use his hands. But all the same I am
ready for him, man to man, at any time. He had three to help him that
time, and that was why I had to stand up and look penitent while old
White-whiskers talked nonsense before he sent me to prison.

I can talk the common talk, and I can talk like a gentleman by birth and
education, which is what I happen to be. To Bates I gave the common
talk--and very common some of it was. Just for a whim, to amuse myself,
I gave the magistrate the other kind, knowing very well the sort of
thing it would make him say.

"It is deplorable," said old White-whiskers, "that an evidently
well-educated man like yourself, possessed of some abilities, and in a
position to get your living by honest work, should take to this crime of
poaching. The fact that you used violence towards the keeper makes the
case all the worse. Men like you are a curse to the country."

Well, I have tried honest work. I have been a classical tutor. I have
been an actor. I have been a bookmaker's clerk. But I like to go my own
way at my own time. And that does not conduce to regular employment. My
great-grandmother, I was always told, was a gipsy woman, and it may be
that I have thrown back to her. I cannot say. I do know that I must go
my own way at my own time, and that my own way is mostly out in the
open, and that I do not love bricks and mortar.

It is not often that I stay for long in one place, and I had stayed too
long in that village. There was a reason, of course, and if you guess
that the reason was a woman, you need not trouble to guess again. I had
a room at Mrs Crewe's cottage and paid my rent for it regularly. I had
done very well with plovers' eggs earlier in the season, and had not
spent all my money yet. It was a mistake to stop so long, because the
keepers began to study me a little. They began to