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forgive?’
    ‘Oh! forgiveness,’ smiled Jake,‘that’s nothing. You soon get over that. I was your age when this thing came along, and I guess I thought very much like you then. I wanted to hurt, and only succeeded in hurting myself. The man I killed wasn’t any the wiser. In prison I soon forgot about him, and what he’d done; all I remembered were the years he might have had, and mine too, gone because I hadn’t stopped to think.’
    ‘What happened quite?’ I said.
    He did not answer me directly.
    ‘When you’re young,’ he said, ‘you make the mistake of plunging too deeply into things. That’s what I did, anyway. I reckoned myself capable of judging men by standards I’d built up for myself. I resented illusions crashing about the place.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘I didn’t see that my concern was with myself, and that however much I fought I couldn’t change things, and the way people went. I believed a great deal in that fellow, and I killed him because he had spoilt the life of some woman I had never even met.’
    As he spoke I could see the Jake of seven years back, and the hatred in his eyes not for the man whom he had destroyed, but for the loss of an ideal. He would crucify himself for no reason. Beneath all this I saw his superiority to myself, for I would have no principles and no standards; I would accept such a thing as natural, making excuses for the conduct of a friend, laughing perhaps, wondering idly as to the attraction of the woman, and wanting to know her.
    ‘Oh! well, if he was like that . . .’ I began, but I was aware my voice did not ring true with sincerity.‘Anyway, what had he done?’
    Now I was curious, and at the same time I despised my curiosity. Jake looked at me and the expression in his eyes made me uncomfortable, as though I were a little schoolboy grubbing over a coarse passage in the Bible.
    ‘Just been selfish,’ he said, ‘and thinking about his body.’
    He did not say any more than this.
    ‘She died of consumption out in Switzerland. She went to pieces after he left her. He was the first, you see, and he hadn’t bothered to think.’
    I nodded, biting my nails; I wanted to get away from the subject of the woman. I felt I wasn’t qualified to judge.
    ‘How did you kill him?’ I asked.
    ‘Fighting in the ring,’ he said, ‘just a cheap prize-fight, one of those affairs in a tent at a circus where you pay half a crown to watch. I broke his neck. Nobody but myself knew how much it was on purpose. At the trial the jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter. I knew I was guilty and I didn’t tell. That’s being a coward. Now you know why I’m here. I’ve served my little sentence.’
    He laughed, and I thought how bitter I would be, how resentful of the world, how bent and broken by the punishment brought on myself. And he was laughing, standing under the lamp-post, lighting another cigarette.
    ‘Maybe I’ve been boring you,’ he said; ‘let’s forget about all that. I’ve told you this just to show you that you don’t have to chuck yourself over a bridge.’
    I wished he did not have this power of making me feel aware of my shame, leaving me stripped before my own eyes without the shadow of an excuse.
    Perhaps for the first time that night I realized what he had saved me from, and but for him I would now be drifting swollen and horrible at the mercy of the river tides.
    He must have seen what was passing in my mind.
    ‘I’m glad I came along,’ he said. Now I knew that because of him there was some meaning left to my existence, and that where-soever I should go in the future, and whatever the days might have in store for me, I should not be alone.
    My knowledge of what he had done, and those years of suffering in prison, had in the little space of time he had taken to tell me so succeeded in making me forget myself that now the thought of my father and the home I had left were become shadowy, ineffectual memories in my mind, and I believed