nondescript person, as I am now. I was supposed to have been called to
the bar. In fact, I believe I HAD been called to the bar. I hadn't
listened to the call. I never intended to practise, and I never did practise.
I only wanted an excuse in the eyes of the world for existing. I suppose
the nearest I have ever come to practicing is now at this moment: I am
defending a murderer. My father had left me well enough provided with
money. I was able to go my own desultory way, riding my hobbies where
I would. I had a good stableful of hobbies. Palmistry was one of them. I
was rather ashamed of this one. It seemed to me absurd, as it seems to
you. Like you, though, I believed in it. Unlike you, I had done more
than merely read a book about it. I had read innumerable books
about it. I had taken casts of all my friends' hands. I had tested and
tested again the points at which Desbarolles dissented from the Gipsies,
and--well, enough that I had gone into it all rather thoroughly, and was as
sound a palmist, as a man may be without giving his whole life to
palmistry.

"One of the first things I had seen in my own hand, as soon as I had
learned to read it, was that at about the age of twenty-six I should have a
narrow escape from death--from a violent death. There was a clean break
in the life-line, and a square joining it--the protective square, you know.
The markings were precisely the same in both hands. It was to be the
narrowest escape possible. And I wasn't going to escape without injury,
either. That is what bothered me. There was a faint line connecting the
break in the lifeline with a star on the line of health. Against that star
was another square. I was to recover from the injury, whatever it might
be. Still, I didn't exactly look forward to it. Soon after I had reached the
age of twenty-five, I began to feel uncomfortable. The thing might be
going to happen at any moment. In palmistry, you know, it is impossible
to pin an event down hard and fast to one year. This particular event was