The prisoner shook his head.

"You are wrong, I had no bad feelings."

"And yet you quarrelled?"

"Violently!"

"Take care. What you say may be used against--" Herries rose with an angry gesture.

"An innocent man such as I am does not need to be careful of his words," he cried. "My life history is miserable enough certainly, but there is no page of which I need be ashamed."

"For an educated man to be in such a plight--."

The prisoner again interrupted.

"Do you know what Jonah's Luck is?

"I know that the person you mention was swallowed by a whale," said Trent with dignity. "I am not entirely a heathen."

In spite of his misery Herries could not help smiling.

"I give you the whale," he said sarcastically. "In spite of my sojourn in the Arctic regions, I have escaped the gullet of that animal. I allude to the prophet's luck. Everything went wrong with him, as it has done with me. Do you know what it is, Inspector, to be unlucky--to try your hardest to earn bread and a roof in the face of circumstances too hard to conquer? Have you ever found doors shut against you? Has your family ever regarded you as a hopeless black sheep, because you had not the money to wash your wool white? I have been hungry, starving, almost without clothes, certainly without fire on freezing days. Life has crushed me into the mire, and every struggle I made to rise, was met with a fresh blow."

"Such miseries as these," said Dogberry, sapiently, "lead men to commit crimes."

"In my case, no," cried Herries, striking the table heavily. "I can look any man in the face, as I look into yours now, and can say that I am honest, in thought, word, and deed."

His clear blue eyes looked into those of the Inspector, and it was the official who first gave way. Turning over the leaves of his pocket-book, to disguise the 

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