THE MISSING WITNESS On the seventeenth, the day I was trysted with the Writer, I had much rebellion against fate.

The thought of him waiting in the _King's Arms_, and of what he would think, and what he would say when next we met, tormented and oppressed me.

The truth was unbelievable, so much I had to grant, and it seemed cruel hard I should be posted as a liar and a coward, and have never consciously omitted what it was possible that I should do.

I repeated this form of words with a kind of bitter relish, and re-examined in that light the steps of my behaviour.

It seemed I had behaved to James Stewart as a brother might; all the past was a picture that I could be proud of, and there was only the present to consider.