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with certainty that my father had never left the house. He had pretended to do so and was now pretending to return. I lay thinking hard for some twenty minutes, after which I heard the return to the house of my mother.
    Now I could write pages on the subject of my thoughts and feelings following this nocturnal incident, but I shall not do so. Can I be expected to enter into a long self-analysis, or even remember with sufficient clearness the exact trend of my thoughts as a lad of seventeen? Such a procedure may be right and proper enough in the popular novelist; but I am not a novelist. I am an old man working more or less against time to set down a series of events, and already experiencing distaste for the physical labour involved in writing. I must concentrate on events—at least for the early part of this history.
    Shortly after the revelation above alluded to (for it certainly was a revelation of my father’s turpitude), the Providence which is said to shape our ends took on the aspect of a malicious demon—an aspect from which I have never been able to disassociate it in my mind. It arranged that my mother should be absent from the house for several relatively long periods. Religious piety had drawn her from the house on several evenings in each week and so allowed ample scope for the sowing of the seed. And now that the dreadful harvest was ripe, Sisterly Piety was the card played. In short her sister fell seriously ill and my mother was called away to nurse her. Had that illness not occurred exactly when it did, I believe that the thing that turned out a tragedy would have ended in no more than a vulgar scandal.
    My mother’s sister visited us only on rare occasions, for she had disgraced herself in my mother’s eyes by marrying a bookmaker. This man, whose name was Evans, had called at our house in my aunt’s company, and although he was received by my mother with cold politeness, I had taken to him at once; and I know that my father thought him excellent company. I shall have more to say later about this excellent man, and need not therefore enter into a description of him at this stage.
    Now my aunt lay ill at her bookmaker-husband’s house at Peckham and my mother felt it incumbent upon her to go there and take charge. I think she experienced some doubts as to the propriety of leaving my father and me alone in the house with a young female, for I overheard scraps of an argument in which the phrases “doesn’t seem the thing,” “what may people think!” “silly convention,” “won’t the boy be here” and so forth led me to gather that this subject of propriety was under discussion. Ultimately my mother presumably decided that I might be regarded as a sufficient chaperon for my father (or he for me) and she departed for Peckham.
    Within a day of her departure things began to happen. I found myself on several occasions interrupting discussions between my father and Mary, discussions which almost bore the appearance of arguments and which dropped to whispers upon my approach. On one occasion Mary was weeping noisily and unrestrainedly while my father appeared to be bullying her. On another he took her boldly into the surgery and was closeted with her for half an hour. And always Mary went about her household duties white-faced, red-eyed and with a look of what I could only analyse as “funk.” And yet, despite the scraps of sexual knowledge I had garnered from the dirty hints of school-fellows and my catholic reading, I was not sufficiently experienced to realize at that time what was actually the matter.
    After a fortnight’s absence my mother returned suddenly to the house, gave a hasty account of her sister’s illness (which account she had already conveyed in a series of letters) deposited in Mary’s charge a bundle of soiled linen and, packing a fresh supply, set off again for Peckham. She was too distressed by her