finality was so strong upon me that I actually found myself sitting in that chair before I realized what had occurred.
What had occurred was that I had become utterly and for good your property.
In that sense only am I reprieved. As far as Edward Burden is concerned I am entirely saved. I stand before you and ask you to turn your thumb up or down. For, having spoken as I have to you, I have given you a right over me. Now that the pressing necessity for my death is over I have to ask you whether I shall plunge into new adventures that will lead me to death or whether I am to find some medium in which we may lead a life of our own, in some way together. I was about to take my life to avoid prison: now prison is no more a part of my scheme of existence. But I must now have some means of working towards you or I must run some new and wild risk to push you out of my thoughts. I don’t, as you know, ask you to be my secret mistress, I don’t ask you to elope with me. But I say that you must belong to me as much in thought as I have, in this parcel of letters, been revealed and given over to you. Otherwise, I must once more gamble—and having tasted of gambling in the shadow of death, I must gamble forever in that way. I must, I mean, feel that I am coming towards you or committing crimes that I may forget you.
My dear, I am a very tired man. If you know what it was to long for you as I have longed for you all these years, you would wonder that I did not, sitting in that chair, put the ring up to my teeth, in spite of Burden’s letter, and end it. I have an irresistible longing for rest—or perhaps it is only your support. To think that I must face forever—or for as long as it lasts—this troublesome excitement of avoiding thoughts of you—that was almost unbearable. I resisted because I had written these letters to you. I love you and I know you love me—yet without them I would have inflicted upon you the wound of my death. Having written them I cannot face the cruelty to you. I mean that, if I had died without your