"Accept it as one, if a warning is necessary," he answered. "Take my advice. If Leslie Guest, or the man who is dying upstairs, has a legacy to leave, let him choose another legatee! There is death in that legacy for you!"
"Death comes to all of us," I answered. "We must take our risks."
He picked up his hat.
"Number 317, was it not?" he repeated thoughtfully, "an unlucky number for you, I fear! … By the bye, Mademoiselle is in the neighborhood."
"What of it?" I asked.
He looked at me long and curiously. Then he sighed and lit still another of my finest Havanas as he prepared to depart.
"You will be better off," he said, "without that legacy!"
CHAPTER XVI
I TAKE UP MY LEGACY
Towards dawn I lit another lamp in my study and chanced to catch a glimpse of my face in a small mirror which stood upon my writing-table. Almost involuntarily I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find another man there. It was a moment's madness, but as a matter of fact I did not recognize myself. It seemed to me that the change in the man upstairs, who had passed from the world of living things with breath in his body and life in his brain to the cold negation of death, was a change no greater than had come to me. For I was passing, as I knew very well, from behind the fences of my somewhat narrow but well-contained life into the great world of tragical happenings, where life and death are but small things, and one's self but a pawn in the great game. This, because I believed, because I had accepted the trust of the man who, a few hours ago, had closed his eyes with his hand in mine, and the faint welcoming smile upon his lips of a brave but weary man, who finds nothing terrible in death.