So he reasoned with himself, and screwed up his courage, and laid
hands on one of the shorter figures that he could reach. It rocked
stiffly in its place, a most palpable and reassuring waxwork. He unwound
the cerements from the hollow and unyielding head; and the face was new to
him; it had not been there the other afternoon. It was a young face like
his own, as ill-mounted on high shoulders, with thickish lips ajar, and
only a pair of intelligent eyes to redeem an apparent heaviness: one and
all his own identical characteristics. And no wonder, for the last
recruit to the waxen army of murderers was a faithful model of himself.

There was no awaking from this dream: the dreamer was not positive that he
had been asleep. The veiled sunlight in his room was just what it had
seemed in that deserted dungeon of swaddled malefactors. The boy
shuddered till the bed shook under him. But after that he still lay on,
facing himself as he had seen himself, and his deed as others must see it
soon or late. Not the actual accident in the Park; but this hiding in the
heart of London, this skulking among strangers, this leaving his own
people to mourn him as the dead!

The thought of them drew scalding tears. Never had they seemed so dear to
him before. It was not only Lettice and their parents. Fred and Horace,
how good they had been to him at school, and how proud he had been of
them! What would they think of him if he went on skulking like this?
What would they have done in his place? Anything but lie low like that,
thought Pocket, and resolved forthwith to play the game as preached and
practised by his brothers. It was strange that he should have been so
dense about so plain a duty overnight; this morning he saw it as sharp as
an image in perfect focus on the ground-glass screen.... To think that a mad
photographer should have talked him into an attitude as mad as his own!
This morning he saw the common sense of the situation as well as its right
and wrong. Nothing would happen to him if he gave himself up, but
anything might if he waited till he was caught. As for the consequences
to his poor mother, surely in the end suspense and uncertainty would eat
deeper into the slender cord of her life than the shock of the truth would
cut.

Having made up his mind, however, as to the only thing to do, the boy
behaved characteristically in not hastening to do it. The ordeal in front
of him, beginning in certain conflict wit