ced me to break my word.

Yet that anger, strongly though it flamed against her, could not
wholly dry the tears that came between my lids as I thought of her.
She had loved me in her own selfish, childish way, and had risked her
own life as well as mine to come to me.

After all, was it not I who had been in the wrong from the first? I
had known she was married. Why had I ever looked at her with that
admiration which had stirred her passion for me? Morley had warned me.
Now it had ended like this and nearly cost us all our lives. But I,
the most guilty of the three, had escaped, and they were both dead.

I appeared to have broken my promise, and now, after already injuring
him so much--one who had never injured me--I had killed Hop Lee. I had
taken his wife, who, he had said, was more than his life. Not
satisfied with that, I had taken his life, too! How horrible it all
was! I felt suffocated beneath the weight of it. But surely, surely it
was Suzee who had thrown this burden on me? Yes, but I had begun the
evil far back in the sunny days at Sitka.

Truly, as I had said to Morley, "One never knows in life."

I had killed him, a poor harmless, defenceless old man who had trusted
me!

One thing after another had gradually pushed me on to this climax, all
having their origin in those careless glances exchanged in the Sitka
tea-shop.

They had thought I should die, too, all the people who had rushed into
the room and found us that night. Myself unconscious, and the others
dead.

The cold voice of a doctor had been the first I had heard as sense
came back to me with the damp night air from the window blowing on my
face:

"He's done for, I should say, you'd better take his depositions if he
can speak."

I had opened my eyes and seen some men carrying out the body of Hop
Lee and the tiny pliable form of dear little Suzee that I should never
see or clasp again.

The landlord had come up ashy-pale and shaking, with a note-book in
his hand, and had questioned and re-questioned me, and I had answered
until I fainted again.

Next, after a black gap, I came to beneath the surgeon's probe which
he was thrusting into my wound, as he would a fork into cold meat.

"He won't get through, I should think; he has too much fever," he was
saying, in the regular callous professional voice.

"But I'm going to try the effect of this new antiseptic dressing, I
want to see if it does harm or not."

I opened my eyes and looked