CHAPTER V
THE JUSTIFICATION OF RODERICK CONNOLEY
It is my business in these memoirs to speak chiefly of the many strange things which happened to Sir Nicolas Steele during the last three or four years I served him; but I do not know why that should prevent me saying a last word here about Roderick Connoley, the barrister, and the many queer stories he told us during our stay in London and afterward in Paris. How far he believed these stories, what foundation in fact they had, it is not for me to decide. That he had lived a curious life, I knew well; that he had lost his left hand in his boyhood was a truth which my eyes told me unmistakably. But how he came to lose it, if his own account is not to be believed, is a thing I am not competent to speak about.
It was a year after the death of Lilian More that we met this remarkable man again; and then we ran against him quite by accident in Paris, where we had been living some months, and allowing London to forget that we existed. He came almost every day to the Hôtel de Lille, where we were stopping; and it was there that he gave my master the manuscript of
