At this juncture, seeing that confidential matters were about to be
discussed, I rose and prepared to withdraw; but Draper waved me back
into my chair.

"You need not go away, Dr. Jervis," he said. "It is through you that I
have the benefit of Dr. Thorndyke's help, and I know that you doctors
can be trusted to keep your own counsel and your clients' secrets. And
now for some confessions of mine. In the first place, it is my painful
duty to tell you that I am a discharged convict--an 'old lag,' as the
cant phrase has it."

He coloured a dusky red as he made this statement, and glanced furtively
at Thorndyke to observe its effect. But he might as well have looked at
a wooden figure-head or a stone mask as at my friend's immovable visage;
and when his communication had been acknowledged by a slight nod, he
proceeded:

"The history of my wrong-doing is the history of hundreds of others. I
was a clerk in a bank, and getting on as well as I could expect in that
not very progressive avocation, when I had the misfortune to make four
very undesirable acquaintances. They were all young men, though rather
older than myself, and were close friends, forming a sort of little
community or club. They were not what is usually described as 'fast.'
They were quite sober and decently-behaved young follows, but they were
very decidedly addicted to gambling in a small way, and they soon
infected me. Before long I was the keenest gambler of them all. Cards,
billiards, pool, and various forms of betting began to be the chief
pleasures of my life, and not only was the bulk of my scanty salary
often consumed in the inevitable losses, but presently I found myself
considerably in debt, without any visible means of discharging my
liabilities. It is true that my four friends were my chief--in fact,
almost my only--creditors, but still, the debts existed, and had to be
paid.

"Now these four friends of mine--named respectively Leach, Pitford,
Hearn, and Jezzard--were uncommonly clever men, though the full extent
of their cleverness was not appreciated by me until too late. And I,
too, was clever in my way, and a most undesirable way it was, for I
possessed the fatal gift of imitating handwriting and signatures with
the most remarkable accuracy. So perfect were my copies that the writers
themselves were frequently unable to distinguish their own signatures
from my imitations, and many a time was my skill invoked by some of my
companions to pl