kept my ears alert for any sound from the floors above me, I pulled
open his shirt and placed my hand upon his heart. My fingers
instantly touched upon the opening of a wound, and as I withdrew them
I found them wet with blood. He was in evening dress, and in the wide
bosom of his shirt I found a narrow slit, so narrow that in the dim
light it was scarcely discernible. The wound was no wider than the
smallest blade of a pocket-knife, but when I stripped the shirt away
from the chest and left it bare, I found that the weapon, narrow as
it was, had been long enough to reach his heart. There is no need to
tell you how I felt as I stood by the body of this boy, for he was
hardly older than a boy, or of the thoughts that came into my head. I
was bitterly sorry for this stranger, bitterly indignant at his
murderer, and, at the same time, selfishly concerned for my own
safety and for the notoriety which I saw was sure to follow. My
instinct was to leave the body where it lay, and to hide myself in
the fog, but I also felt that since a succession of accidents had
made me the only witness to a crime, my duty was to make myself a
good witness and to assist to establish the facts of this murder.

"That it might, possibly, be a suicide, and not a murder, did not
disturb me for a moment. The fact that the weapon had disappeared,
and the expression on the boy's face were enough to convince, at
least me, that he had had no hand in his own death. I judged it,
therefore, of the first importance to discover who was in the house,
or, if they had escaped from it, who had been in the house before I
entered it. I had seen one man leave it; but all I could tell of him
was that he was a young man, that he was in evening dress, and that
he had fled in such haste that he had not stopped to close the door
behind him.