The detective again entered the room, followed by two officers of police.
"Come, sir," he said, "we must go now," and he put his hand lightly on Carew's shoulder.
As the hand touched him, Carew's elbow slipped, his head dropped heavily upon the table, face downwards, and from his left hand, which had been over his mouth, there fell on the table, and rolled slowly across it, a small empty bottle.
He was quite dead! He had found a use at last for the poisonous drug which the Rotterdam chemist had grudgingly sold him.
* * * * * *
"The prisoner has slipped away from us," said the detective; "but, after all, I am not sorry for it in a way, for there was good in the man."
And so ended the misspent life of Henry Carew—a man by nature probably no worse than many of the most respectable-seeming among us. But he was morally timid; and such a one, however benevolent be his disposition, however opposed to vice be his inclinations, is the slave of circumstances, and is quite as likely to develop into a villain as a saint. A weak will is the devil's easiest prey.
Arthur Allen's narrative will be given in his own words:—
"The last thing I remember, after Jim and myself were capsized, is that I was holding on to the dinghy, and that I lashed myself to her with the painter. Poor Jim must have gone down at once. I don't remember seeing him after the boat turned over. The seas must have driven the sense out of me. I came to, days afterwards, in the cabin of a German barque. She had picked me up—still lashed to the dinghy—in an insensible condition. The barque was bound from Hamburg to Rio. My long exposure in the water brought on a serious and tedious illness. I was more dead than alive when I landed at Rio, and was at once taken to the hospital. There the English Consul called to see me, and behaved with great kindness. When I told him my story, and who I was, he said, 'A man of your name came here with a yacht a short time back—an eccentric man, for he only stopped two days here and was off again; so I did not see him.' I asked what the name of the yacht was. 'The Petrel,' he replied. Then, of course, the whole truth dawned upon me, and I satisfied the consul that someone had stolen my yacht and had assumed my name. The consul then advanced to me the money I required. I was still lying in the hospital when the news came to Rio that the Petrel had been lost at sea, and that her crew had found a derelict, and sailed her into Pernambuco. In spite of the doctor's warnings, I left the hospital, and hurried here at once. I was awaiting an extradition warrant from England, when Mr. Norton anticipated my own action, and arrived with a warrant that had been obtained on account of former felonies committed by Carew."