As We Forgive Them

In these modern times of breathless hurry and great combines, when birth counts for nothing; when fortunes are made in a day and credit is lost in an hour, men’s secrets are sometimes very strange ones. It is one of these which I have here revealed; one that will, I anticipate, both startle and puzzle the reader. The mystery is, in fact, one taken from the daily life about us, the truth concerning it having hitherto been regarded as strictly confidential by the persons herein mentioned, although I am now permitted by them to make the remarkable circumstances public.
William Le Queux.
Lastra a Signa, Florence.

“Dead! And he’s carried his secret with him to his grave!”
“Never!”
“But he has. Look! His jaw has dropped. Can’t you see the change, man!”
“Then he’s carried out his threat after all!”
“By Heaven, he has! We’ve been fools, Reggie—utter idiots!” I whispered.
“So it seems. I confess that I fully expected he’d tell us the truth when he knew that the end had really come.”
“Ah! you didn’t know him as I did,” I remarked bitterly. “He had a will of iron and a nerve of steel.”