burnt, my work. A flame was dying
down in the grate, filled and overflowing with ragged black fragments.
With a curse I sprang towards the fender, but Nous was quicker than I.
Either divining my intention, or made suspicious by the queer, sinister
look Howard's figure had, the dog flew upon him with a growl, rolled
him over and seized the clothing at his neck.

In another instant I would have called him off, but Howard was an
inveterate coward. I saw his face turn livid with terror as the dog
pinned his throat to the floor. His hand stretched out convulsively and
grasped a long table knife that lay, together with the string that had
held my manuscript, beside him on the floor. He seized it, and in an
instant, before my eyes, he had plunged it deep into the breast of the
dog standing over him. It was all done in a second--a flash. There was
a gush of blood upon the floor, a broken moan from Nous, and then he
staggered and fell over on his side--motionless.

Howard struggled breathless, white as death, to his feet. For one
second I stood transfixed, watching him with blazing eyes. Then one
step forward and I was upon him. My two hands closed like steel round
his throat, and by his head, thus, I dragged him from the hearth out
into the centre of the room.

"You unutterable, unspeakable cur and devil!" I muttered, and I saw his
face blackening under my grip.

A gust of wind passed through the room, blowing to the door with a
bang, and it whirled aloft, round us, broken and quivering pieces of
black tinder. The air was full of them. And the dead dog lay in a pool
of blood before us. It seemed to me that my brain was rocking with the
fury and rage I felt--my whole frame convulsed in it. The loss, the
irreparable loss, the killed hopes I saw in those floating ashes round
me, came home to me till my brain seemed breaking asunder with anger.
To murder him came the impulse! How? There were a thousand ways! To
grind my fingers still deeper into his throat--THUS! THUS! Or that long
knife that lay there on the rug, driven into and twisted round in his
breast; or that sharp corner of the fender to batter out his brains; or
drag him through the long, open window and hurl him in the darkness
from that second floor balcony. Which? Devil! devil! Then as I held him
there the thought pierced me,--Was I a brute to feel a blind rage like
this? Had I ever in my life lost my own self-command, that command
which sets us where we stand as m