I beg you therefore to suspend your judgment, until I have finished, as far as my poor powers allow, my unravelling of his tangled skein.

And pray remember too that I have sought all through to present you with the facts PARI PASSU with my knowledge of them.

I have tried to tell the story through myself.

I could think of no other way of creating an essential verisimilitude.

Yet, even now, writing in the light of full knowledge, I cannot admit that, when Boyce in that Town Hall faced the world--for, in the deep tragic sense Wellingsford was his world--anyone knowing as much as I did would have been justified in calling his demeanour criminal callousness.
I say that he exhibited a glorious defiance.