“If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime has been committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally detained.”

“No crime, but a very great error has been committed,” said Holmes. “You would have done better to have trusted you wife.”

“It was not the wife; it was the children,” groaned the prisoner. “God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My God! What an exposure! What can I do?”

Sherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him kindly on the shoulder.

“If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up,” said he, “of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand, if you convince the police authorities that there is no possible case against you, I do not know that there is any reason that the details should find their way into the papers. Inspector Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon anything which you might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The case would then never go into court at all.”

“God bless you!” cried the prisoner passionately. “I would have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children.

“You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a school-master in in Chesterfield, where I received an excel-: lent education. I travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and finally became a reporter on an evening paper in London. One day my editor wished to have a series of articles upon begging in the metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the point from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying begging as an amateur that I could get the facts upon which to base my articles. When an actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments. I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of flesh-coloured plaster. Then with a red head of hair, and an appropriate dress, I took my station in the business part of the city, ostensibly as a match-seller but really as a beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when I returned home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no less than 26s. 4d.

“I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until, some time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ served upon me for 25 pounds. I was at my wit’s end where to get the money, but a sudden idea came to me. I begged a fortnight’s grace from the creditor, asked for a holiday from my employers, and spent the time in begging in the City under my disguise. In ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.

“Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at 2 pounds a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still. It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers. Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This fellow, a lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my secret was safe in his possession.

Aaron felt very queer.

“But for how long will you settle down—?” he asked.

“Oh, only the winter. I am a vagrant really: or a migrant. I must migrate. Do you think a cuckoo in Africa and a cuckoo in Essex is one AND the same bird? Anyhow, I know I must oscillate between north and south, so oscillate I do. It’s just my nature. All people don’t have the same needs.”

“Perhaps not,” said Aaron, who had risen and was sitting on the side of the bed.

“I would very much like to try life in another continent, among another race. I feel Europe becoming like a cage to me. Europe may be all right in herself. But I find myself chafing. Another year I shall get out. I shall leave Europe. I begin to feel caged.”

“I guess there are others that feel caged, as well as you,” said Aaron.

“I guess there are.”

And maybe they haven’t a chance to get out.”

Lilly was silent a moment. Then he said:

“Well, I didn’t make life and society. I can only go my own way.”

Aaron too was silent. A deep disappointment was settling over his spirit.

“Will you be alone all winter?”

“Just myself and Tanny,” he answered. “But people always turn up.”

“And then next year, what will you do?”

“Who knows? I may sail far off. I should like to. I should like to try quite a new life–mode. This is finished in me—and yet perhaps it is absurd to go further. I’m rather sick of seekers. I hate a seeker.”

“What,” said Aaron rather sarcastically—“those who are looking for a new religion?”

“Religion—and love—and all that. It’s a disease now.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Aaron. “Perhaps the lack of love and religion is the disease.”

“Ah—bah! The grinding the old millstones of love and God is what ails us, when there’s no more grist between the stones. We’ve ground love very small. Time to forget it. Forget the very words religion, and God, and love—then have a shot at a new mode. But the very words rivet us down and don’t let us move. Rivets, and we can’t get them out.”

“And where should we be if we could?” said Aaron.

“We might begin to be ourselves, anyhow.”

“And what does that mean?” said Aaron. “Being yourself—what does it mean?”

“To me, everything.”

“And to most folks, nothing. They’ve got to have a goal.”

“There is no goal. I loathe goals more than any other impertinence. Gaols, they are. Bah—jails and jailers, gaols and gaolers—–”

“Wherever you go, you’ll find people with their noses tied to some goal,” said Aaron.

“Their wagon hitched to a star—which goes round and round like an ass in a gin,” laughed Lilly. “Be damned to it.”