Carew had been nearly six weeks in Pernambuco, when a British mail steamer happened to land an English passenger, who at once called on the consul, and introduced himself to that functionary as Mr. Norton. He had that to say which considerably astonished the consul, and the result was that on the following morning a letter was brought to Carew as he was sitting down to his breakfast at the hotel with Baptiste. It was from the consul's clerk, and ran thus:—"Sir, will you kindly call here to-day? Your business is practically settled."

"Practically settled?" repeated Baptiste, when he heard the contents. "Those words have an unpleasant ring somehow. I know not why, but I cannot help fearing that something is wrong."

"I too have my presentiments," said Carew, "but I am prepared."

At the appointed hour Carew called at the Consulate. He found the consul and Lloyd's agent awaiting him in a room adjoining the principal office.

There was a constraint in their manner, which he, watchful for the slightest suspicious indication, detected at once. They were as men who anticipated some momentous event, but who endeavoured to conceal their anxiety.

The consul produced a document, and laid it on the desk. "Read this over, please, Mr. Allen, and see that it is correct."

Carew glanced down it quickly with an eye trained to legal forms. "It is perfectly correct," he said.

"I have a gentleman in the next room who will witness your signature to this statement," proceeded the consul. He opened the door, and Mr. Norton entered the room.

The consciousness of impending peril came over Carew's guilty soul, but he seized the pen, and in a firm hand wrote the signature, "Arthur Allen, Barrister-at-law."

Mr. Norton now approached the table. He took up the pen as if to sign his name, glanced at the document, and then, raising his head, looked Carew full in the face. "I cannot witness this signature," he said. "It is a forgery!"

There was a complete silence for a few moments; then Carew, whose face was pale, but who betrayed no other signs of emotion, said quietly, "Explain your strange words, sir."

"It is no good; the game is up, Mr. Carew," replied Norton. "I have a warrant for your arrest, and the police are at the door."

"A trap has been laid for me, I see," said Carew, as quietly as before. "This is one of the absurd mistakes you detectives so often make; but I will soon clear it up. Of what am I accused?" Carew was astonished at his own courage in the presence of this extreme disaster, or rather—for it can scarcely be called courage—at his indifference to his fate. He felt as if he were the spectator of a tragedy which was being played by other men, and in which he was not himself an actor—a common state of mind with men in utmost peril.

"The charge with which I am immediately concerned," replied the detective, "and on account of which an extradition warrant has been issued, is the forgery of a client's name by the solicitor Henry Carew. In the meanwhile, look at these," and he threw on the table two photographs. Carew took them up. One, he saw, was a portrait of Arthur Allen, his friend whom he left to drown in the North Sea; the other was a photograph of himself which had been taken eight years back, when he was another man, when his conscience was still clear, and before his gambling losses had driven him from crime to crime; sin and suffering had yet drawn no lines on the face, the brow was free from care. He gazed gloomily at this presentment of what he had been and could never be again, and his mind wandered back with despairing regret to memories of guiltless days.

"On the 15th of August last," continued the detective, "a solicitor, Henry Carew, absconded, disappeared, leaving no trace. For some time I, who was entrusted with the case, was altogether at fault; but at last, as often happens, a coincidence threw me on the scent. I came across an advertisement inserted in the papers by the relatives of a missing man, Arthur Allen. He had left his chambers on the 15th of August, and had not since been heard of. Carew and Allen thus disappeared from London on the same day, mark you; but there was no very remarkable coincidence in that fact. However, I happened to remember that, while searching the papers of Carew to discover what were his habits, who were his acquaintances, and so forth, I had come across the name of this Arthur Allen, apparently a friend of Carew's. The clue was worth following up. I soon ascertained that Allen had that day sailed from the Thames in his yacht; that his last known port of call was Rotterdam. I went to Rotterdam, and there, from a Mr. Hoogendyk and others, learnt that the man who called himself Arthur Allen had conducted himself in a somewhat curious manner for an English yachtsman, and had suddenly sailed from that port, bound no one knew whither, with a crew of Spanish desperadoes."

The detective now took the two photographs from the hand of Carew, who was still gazing at them in a dazed way, apparently not listening to the words of his accuser.

"I procured these," Norton went on. "I brought them to Mr. Hoogendyk. First I showed him the portrait of Arthur Allen; he did not recognise it. Then I gave him the portrait of Henry Carew. 'This, of course,' he at once said, 'is the photograph of Mr. Allen, the Englishman who came here with the little yacht.' Then I knew that I was on the right track. Shortly afterwards, a paragraph which appeared in a London evening paper brought me promptly here, armed with an extradition warrant. I have the paragraph here. It is headed 'A Strange Story of the Sea.' I will read it to you. 'A telegram from Pernambuco states that a French barque, the La Bonne Esperance, has been brought into that port a derelict. She was picked up by the crew of an English yacht, the Petrel. The Petrel had foundered in the South Atlantic. Mr. Allen, the owner, and his three men took to the dinghy, and, after drifting for several days, encountered the deserted barque, which they sailed into Pernambuco. The salvage is likely to far more than compensate Mr. Allen for the loss of his yacht.' That is all I need say at present."

The consul spoke next. "There is a Mr. Rudge here, who has been in Pernambuco for some weeks, who can also throw a light on this matter." The consul touched the bell, and the man who had assumed the name of Rudge was shown into the room. He closed the door behind him, and stood with his back against it.

"This gentleman," said the consul deliberately, "affirms that he is Arthur Allen, the barrister, the owner of the lost yacht."

All in the room now turned their eyes upon Carew, to watch the effect upon him of this sudden presence.

Yes, it was indeed Allen, though pale and thin, as if he had but just recovered from a sudden illness, that Carew saw before him. And now this strange being, who had fallen into such depths of crime, and who yet loathed crime so intensely, behaved in the manner that might have been expected from him. The better man declared himself at last. On beholding this accuser, who had risen thus suddenly from the dead, he displayed no guilty terror. On the contrary, an expression of great relief, of joy, almost of triumph, lit up his face, and the lines of care faded away from it.

They all watched him with wonder.

Then he spoke quietly, in tones that carried conviction. No one could doubt but that the words were from his heart.

"Yes, I am Henry Carew. I am guilty of all that I am accused of, and of more, and worse things. But I am glad, indeed glad—and little gladness has been my lot of late—to see you, Arthur Allen, standing there alive before me. There is one less crime on my soul. Yes, I am now happy; happier than I deserve to be. I am quite ready to pay the penalty of my sins."

There was a nobility in his countenance as he stood up erect, with none of the shrinking criminal about him. He felt as if he were out of the world already; he was free from petty fears now.

Then the consul, impressed by the man's manner, said, in an almost respectful tone, "It is better that you should go on board the English steamer at once. I have arranged everything."

The detective whispered something into the consul's ear, and then slipped out of the room quietly.

Carew looked through the window at the fair tropical world without. He could see the busy quay, with its green trees waving in the fresh trade wind, and the breakers dashing upon the coral reef. Beyond that, between the blue sea and the blue sky, there loomed a dark mass. Carew knew that this was the vessel which was to be his prison, lying at anchor in the outer roads. He shivered; then turning to the consul said—

"Grant me one last favour before I go: let me have paper and pen. I wish to write a letter."

The consul hesitated.

"Give it to him," whispered Allen, who had been eyeing Carew intently; and Carew rewarded him with a grateful look.

The writing materials were put on the table. He sat before them with his back to the spectators, and as he held the pen in his right hand, he placed his left elbow upon the table, stooping over it, his face buried in the open palm as if he were meditating deeply what he should write. And so he remained for quite a minute without writing a word. Once a slight tremor passed through his frame. After that he sat quite motionless.

The detective again entered the room, followed by two officers of police.

"Come, sir," he said, "we must go now," and he put his hand lightly on Carew's shoulder.

As the hand touched him, Carew's elbow slipped, his head dropped heavily upon the table, face downwards, and from his left hand, which had been over his mouth, there fell on the table, and rolled slowly across it, a small empty bottle.

He was quite dead! He had found a use at last for the poisonous drug which the Rotterdam chemist had grudgingly sold him.

* * * * * *

"The prisoner has slipped away from us," said the detective; "but, after all, I am not sorry for it in a way, for there was good in the man."

And so ended the misspent life of Henry Carew—a man by nature probably no worse than many of the most respectable-seeming among us. But he was morally timid; and such a one, however benevolent be his disposition, however opposed to vice be his inclinations, is the slave of circumstances, and is quite as likely to develop into a villain as a saint. A weak will is the devil's easiest prey.

Arthur Allen's narrative will be given in his own words:—

"The last thing I remember, after Jim and myself were capsized, is that I was holding on to the dinghy, and that I lashed myself to her with the painter. Poor Jim must have gone down at once. I don't remember seeing him after the boat turned over. The seas must have driven the sense out of me. I came to, days afterwards, in the cabin of a German barque. She had picked me up—still lashed to the dinghy—in an insensible condition. The barque was bound from Hamburg to Rio. My long exposure in the water brought on a serious and tedious illness. I was more dead than alive when I landed at Rio, and was at once taken to the hospital. There the English Consul called to see me, and behaved with great kindness. When I told him my story, and who I was, he said, 'A man of your name came here with a yacht a short time back—an eccentric man, for he only stopped two days here and was off again; so I did not see him.' I asked what the name of the yacht was. 'The Petrel,' he replied. Then, of course, the whole truth dawned upon me, and I satisfied the consul that someone had stolen my yacht and had assumed my name. The consul then advanced to me the money I required. I was still lying in the hospital when the news came to Rio that the Petrel had been lost at sea, and that her crew had found a derelict, and sailed her into Pernambuco. In spite of the doctor's warnings, I left the hospital, and hurried here at once. I was awaiting an extradition warrant from England, when Mr. Norton anticipated my own action, and arrived with a warrant that had been obtained on account of former felonies committed by Carew."

The true story of the French barque and her crew was never known. Baptiste and the two Spaniards took alarm and disappeared from Pernambuco. Not that they were in danger, for they were not implicated in the felonies which had been brought home to Carew. But the guilty wretches knew not what would be discovered next, they so completely distrusted each other, each knowing that he himself would readily betray his comrades, either for a price or to secure his own safety.

What ultimately happened to these three villains I do not know. Baptiste being a criminal of the educated, cunning, and cowardly-cautious order, possibly enriched himself by iniquity for many years more, and, escaping his deserts in this world, may yet have died in his old age, a respected citizen in his native land.

The other two more vulgar scoundrels were no doubt hanged, or stabbed in a brawl, or despatched in some such summary fashion sooner or later—a penalty for their crimes which seems light indeed to men of this brutal stamp, who consider a violent death as the most desirable and indeed only legitimate termination to existence.

THE END

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