loved. And she laughed in his face, and asked him if a human creature
who had discovered a new life would be likely to give it up. "A new
death," he murmured, and then, looking in a mirror near to him, saw his
lips curved in the thin, pale smile of the hypocrite.

*****

So far the two young men had written. They worked hard, but their
industry was occasionally interrupted by the unaccountable laziness
of Andrew, who, after toiling with unremitting fury for some days, and
scarcely getting up from his desk, would disappear, and perhaps not
return for several nights. Henley remonstrated with him, but in vain.

"But what do you do, my dear fellow?" he asked. "What becomes of you?"

"I go away to think out what is coming. The environment I seek helps
me," answered Andrew, with a curious, gleaming smile. "I return full of
fresh copy."

This was true enough. He generally mysteriously departed when the book
was beginning to flag, and on his reappearance he always set to work
with new vigour and confidence.

"It seems to me," Henley said, "that it will be your book after all, not
mine. It is your plot, and when I think things over I find that every
detail is yours. You insisted on the house where the man and the woman
hid themselves being on the Chelsea Embankment. You invented the woman,
her character, her appearance. You named her Olive Beauchamp."

"Olive Beauchamp," Andrew repeated, with a strange lingering over the
two words, which he pronounced in a very curious voice that trembled, as
if with some keen emotion, love or hate. "Yes; I named her as you say."

"Then, as the man in the play remarks, 'Where do I come in?'" Henley
asked, half laughing, half vexed. "Upon my word, I shall have some
compunction in putting my name below yours on the title-page when the
book is published, if it ever is."

Andrew's lips twitched once or twice uneasily. Then he said, "You need
not have any such compunction. The greatest chapter will probably be
written by you."

"Which chapter do you mean?"

"That which winds the story up--that which brings the whole thing to its
legitimate conclusion. You must write the _denouement_."

"I doubt if I could. And then we have not even now decided what it is to
be."

"We need not bother about that yet. It will come. Fate will decide it
for us."

"What do you mean, Andrew? How curiously you talk about the book
sometimes--so precisely as if it were true!"

Trenchard smiled again, struc