He paused. “Come,” said Gilead, “we are no Pharisees here.”
“At first,” said the young man, lowering his eyes, “I hardly realised my position. I was strong and hopeful, and foresaw no great difficulty in procuring a situation. I did not understand that, without especial attainments, my chance was almost nothing in the struggle for existence. But I was quickly disillusioned. In a few weeks’ time I was utterly destitute, and at my wits’ end to know what to do or where to turn.”
“I was used to frequent a free library in the district where I lodged, to read the advertisements in the papers and answer such of them as I thought promising. One day the devil put it into my head that the walls of this room offered a resource to a starved and desperate man. There were hung on them a number of Japanese prints” (Gilead stirred and drew in his breath), “the gift of an eccentric patron, some of which my knowledge gained under Mr Lerroux told me were of considerable market value. What loss, moral or material, would their removal entail upon the frequenters of such a place? Christmas cartoons, I thought, would prove infinitely more to their taste. I dismissed the temptation, but it returned again and again, and each time more formidable. Presently, half involuntarily, I satisfied myself of the ease with which the room could be entered at night from the back, which abutted upon an empty yard. And then—and, then, sir, at last, I fell.”
Trembling all over, he took from his breast a pocket-book, and from the book a number of papers, one of which he selected and, rising, carried across to Gilead.
“Will you please to read it sir?” he said. “It is a damning witness, but a reminder and a warning which I can never make up my mind to part with.”
He stood with bowed head, while Gilead accepted and examined the slip presented to him. It was merely a printed paragraph, a cutting of a newspaper report, and it ran as follows. Gilead read it out in a low voice, that Miss Halifax might hear:—
“Late on Wednesday night the B... Free Library was broken into, and an attempt made to steal a number of Japanese colour prints from the walls of the reading-room. The thief procured an entrance through a window easy of access from an unoccupied yard at the back of the premises, and was in the act of removing the prints from their frames for the purpose of making an inconspicuous parcel of them, when he was alarmed, it is conjectured, by the movements of the caretaker above, and decamped, leaving his spoil behind him. The prominence lately given, through the Happer and other sales, to the commercial value of these works of art, was no doubt accountable for the attempt, which should prove instructive to the librarian. The police have a clue, it is said, in some finger-marks, and in one thumb mark in particular, left by the burglar upon the wet plaster of a wall in the window embrasure, which that very day had undergone some repairs.”
Gilead looked up with a reassuring smile.
“Let him that is without sin among us cast the first stone,” he said.
The young fellow gave an irrepressible gasp.