It was indeed a cricis.

However, by getting in through a pantrey window, which I had done since a child for cake and so on, I entered the hall and was able, without a sound, to close and lock the library door.  In this way, owing to nails in the windows, I thus had the Gilty Member of our MENAGE so that only the one window remained, and I now returned to the outside and covered it with a steady aim.

What was my horror to see a bag thrust out through this window and set down by the unknown within!

Dear reader, have you ever stood by and seen a home you loved looted, despoiled and deprived of even the egg spoons, silver after-dinner coffee cups, jewels and toilet articals?  If not, you cannot comprehand my greif and stern resolve to recover them, at whatever cost.

I by now cared little for the Reward but everything for honor.

The second Theif was now aproaching.  I sank behind a steamer chair and waited.

Need I say here that I meant to kill no one?  Have I not, in every page, shown that I am one for peace and have no desire for bloodshed?  I think I have.  Yet, when the Theif apeared on the verandah and turned a pocket flash on the leather bag, which I percieved was one belonging to the Familey, I felt indeed like shooting him, although not in a fatal spot.

He then entered the room and spoke in a low tone.

The reward was mine.

I but slipped to the window and closed it from the outside, at the same time putting in a nail as mentioned before, so that it could not be raised, and then, raising my revolver in the air, I fired the remaining four bullets, forgeting the roof of the verandah which now has four holes in it.

Can I go on?  Have I the strength to finish?  Can I tell how the Theif cursed and tried to raise the window, and how every one came downstairs in their night clothes and broke in the library door, while carrying pokers, and knives, et cetera.  And how, when they had met with no violence but only sulkey silence, and turned on the lights, there was Leila dressed ready to elope, and the Theif had his arms around her, and she was weeping?  Because he was poor, although of good familey, and lived in another city, where he was a broker, my familey had objected to him.  Had I but been taken into Leila’s confidence, which he considered I had, or at least that I understood, how I would have helped, instead of thwarting!  If any parents or older sisters read this, let them see how wrong it is to leave any member of the familey in the dark, especialy in affaires de COUER.

Having seen from the verandah window that I had comitted an enor, and unable to bear any more, I crawled in the pantrey window again and went up stairs to my Chamber.  There I undressed and having hid my weapon, pretended to be asleep.

Some time later I heard my father open the door and look in.