"But it's all over now. I have gone too far. I have helped you, and am equally guilty with you, to commit a frightful crime. Lax as I have always been, I can no longer feel I have any proper place among men of my own sort. All I can say is that I am glad I shall die without anybody knowing what I really am.
"I write this note after dinner, and, finding the number of your room from the hotel clerk, I leave it here for you to see. I am going to make an end of it all in an hour or two, when I have written a few notes to acquaintances and so on. I can't go on living, Gouldesbrough, because night and day, day and night, I am haunted by the thought of that poor young man you have got in your foul house in Regent's Park. What you are doing to him I don't know. The end of your revenge I can only guess at. But it is all so horrible that I am glad to be done with life. I wish you good-bye; and I wish to God--if there is really a God--that I had never crossed your path and never been your miserable tool.
As Sir William Gouldesbrough read this letter, his whole tall figure became rigid. He seemed to stiffen as a corpse stiffens.
Then, quite suddenly, he turned round and pushed the letter into the depths of the glowing fire, pressing the paper down with the poker until every vestige of it was consumed.
He strode to the door of the room, opened it, came out into the wide carpeted corridor and hurried up to the lift.
He pressed the button and heard it ring far down below.
In a minute or two there came the clash of the shutting doors, the "chunk" of the hydraulic mechanism, and he saw the shadow of the lift-roof rising up towards him.
"Will you take me up to the fourth floor, please," he said, "to Mr. Eustace Charliewood's room?"
"Mr. Charliewood, sir?" the man replied. "Oh, yes, I remember, number 408. Tall, clean-shaved gentleman."
"That's him," Sir William said. "I have only just learnt that he has been staying in the hotel. He is an old friend, and I had no idea he was here."
The iron doors clashed, the lift shot upward, and the attendant and Sir William arrived at the fourth floor.
"Down the corridor, sir, and the first turning on the right," the lift-man said. "But perhaps I'd better show you."