William Le Queux "As We Forgive Them" Preface. From the Author to the Reader. In these modern times of breathless hurry and great combines, when birth counts for nothing; when fortunes are made in a day and credit is lost in an hour, men’s secrets are sometimes very strange ones. It is one of these which I have here revealed; one that will, I anticipate, both startle and puzzle the reader. The mystery is, in fact, one taken from the daily life about us, the truth concerning it having hitherto been regarded as strictly confidential by the persons herein mentioned, although I am now permitted by them to make the remarkable circumstances public. William Le Queux. Lastra a Signa, Florence. Chapter One. The Stranger in Manchester. “Dead! And he’s carried his secret with him to his grave!” “Never!” “But he has. Look! His jaw has dropped. Can’t you see the change, man!” “Then he’s carried out his threat after all!” “By Heaven, he has! We’ve been fools, Reggie—utter idiots!” I whispered. “So it seems. I confess that I fully expected he’d tell us the truth when he knew that the end had really come.” “Ah! you didn’t know him as I did,” I remarked bitterly. “He had a will of iron and a nerve of steel.” “Combined with the constitution of a horse, or he’d been dead long ago. But we’ve been outwitted—cleanly outwitted by a dying man. He defied us, laughed at our ignorance to the very last.” “Blair was no fool. He knew what knowledge of the truth meant to us—a huge fortune. So he simply kept his secret.”
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