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 He thought of the quiet house in Tynice and of the girl who had stood in the very room, desperately determined to protect that third person. He took up all Thomas’s commercial correspondence and ran to burn it in the stove, which he found full of charred papers. It was evident that Thomas himself had simplified conditions in this way before he left.

Good; that dealt with the commercial papers; there remained a few purely private letters, tender or dreadfully scrawled, and over these again Prokop hesitated in burning shame. But what on earth else was he to do? He was suffocating with embarrassment but he boldly opened the remaining envelopes. “Darling, I remember,” “a further meeting,”—and so on. A certain Anna Chvalova stated with the most touching orthographical mistakes that Jenicek had died “of an erruption.” Somebody else intimated that “he knew something that might interest the police but that he would be willing to discuss the question,” and that Mr. Thomas “certainly knew the price of his discretion”; there followed an allusion to “that house in Bret Street where Mr. Thomas knew whom to speak to if the affair was to be kept secret.” Then something about some business or other, the sale of some bills, signed “your Rosie.” The same Rosie stated that her husband had gone away. The same handwriting as in No. 1, a letter from a watering-place, nothing but bovine sentimentality, the unbridled passion of a fat and mature blonde, sweetened all over with ahs! reproofs, and lofty sentiments, apart from “sweetheart” and “ducky” and other abominations. Pro-