Page:JM Barrie--My lady nicotine.djvu/213

 Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and that I did not really murder the waits. Perhaps they are living still. Yet the scene is very vivid before me, though the affair took place—if it ever did take place—so long ago that I cannot be expected to remember the details. The time when I must give up smoking was drawing near, so that I may have been unusually irritable, and determined, whatever the cost, to smoke my last pound tin of the Arcadia in peace. I think my briar was in my mouth when I did it, but after the lapse of months I cannot say whether there were three of them or only two. So far as I can remember I took the man with the beard first.

The incident would have made more impression on me had there been any talk about it. So far as I could discover, it never got into the papers. The porters did not seem to think it any affair of theirs, though one of them must have guessed why I invited the waits upstairs. He saw me open the door to them; he was aware that this was their 207