When I turned to my companion I found him staring confusedly at the houses.
“Why—where are we?” he inquired with considerable astonishment in his voice.
“In Russell Square, and this is where I live,” pointing to No. 12, where the hansom had stopped.
“Well, that is certainly very remarkable,” he observed with a low laugh of astonishment. “Why, I live next door to you.” Saying this he handed me his card, on which I found engraved, Amidio Pasquale, 13 Russell Square, London. “I chose No. 13 for a residence to see whether there were any ill-luck in the number.” This last remark was the result of my having somewhat unconsciously repeated the word “thirteen;” but I was thinking only of the extraordinary coincidence that we who had been brought together under such circumstances that day as would almost certainly tend to bind us to each other in future, should find ourselves already next-door neighbors.
Was it a coincidence—or was it only the first distinct move made by the finger of fate on the chess-board of our lives?
Now, in these later years, when I recall the terrible ending to our brief friendship begun that afternoon, it seems to my embittered and discouraged soul that there was naught of coincidence in the circumstance at all but, that, the time having come, Destiny began her grim and blood-stained task in that kindly work of mercy attempted on the Old North Road that day, reckless whether the blows which fell so unrelentingly from her hand were struck by means of the crosier of the Churchman or by the bludgeon of the assassin; or whether it was the pinion of an angel or the hoof of a demon which she had seized to speed her in her dire inscrutable work.
Is it because Man’s best deeds fall so far short of the approval of the Immortal Gods that ofttimes they appear to be used—in sheer satire—as instruments of untold misery and tragedy?
My friend accompanied me to my rooms, and for a time he sat in silence, crouching over the fire in the grate, and every now and then shivering as if from the sight of another horror.
“Did the appearance of the dogs impress you so very painfully?” I inquired, anxious to find some solution for my new friend’s state of semi-hysteria.
“O don’t speak of it!” he exclaimed, his voice quivering with emotion, and the tears welling in his eyes, “One dog was literally being worried to death!”