used furiously to
hear me. It was useless to persist. Whatever the danger that threatened
me might be, the sooner it showed itself the easier I should feel. I
told him that Mrs. Gracedieu had called on me, after he and his wife had
left the town.

"Do you mean to tell me," he cried, "that she came to you?"

"I do."

After that answer, he no longer required the paper to help him. He threw
it from him on the floor.

"And you received her," he said, "without inquiring whether I knew of
her visit or not? Guilty deception on your part--guilty deception on her
part. Oh, the hideous wickedness of it!"

When his mad suspicion that I had been his wife's lover betrayed itself
in this way, I made a last attempt, in the face of my own conviction
that it was hopeless, to place my conduct and his wife's conduct before
him in the true light.

"Mrs. Gracedieu's object was to consult me--" Before I could say the
next words, I saw him put his hand into the pocket of his dressing-gown.

"An innocent man," he sternly declared, "would have told me that my wife
had been to see him--you kept it a secret. An innocent woman would have
given me a reason for wishing to go to you--she kept it a secret, when
she left my house; she kept it a secret when she came back."

"Mr. Gracedieu, I insist on being heard! Your wife's motive--"

He drew from his pocket the thing that he had hidden from me. This time,
there was no concealment; he let me see that he was opening a razor. It
was no time for asserting my innocence; I had to think of preserving my
life. When a man is without firearms, what defense can avail against a
razor in the hands of a madman? A chair was at my side; it offered the
one poor means of guarding myself that I could see. I laid my hand on
it, and kept my eye on him.

He paused, looking backward and forward between the picture and me.

"Which of them shall I kill first?" he said to himself. "The man who
was my trusted friend? Or the woman whom I believed to be an angel on
earth?" He stopped once more, in a state of fierce self-concentration,
debating what he should do. "The woman," he decided. "Wretch! Fiend!
Harlot! How I loved her!!!"

With a yell of fury, he pounced on the picture--ripped the canvas out of
the frame--and cut it malignantly into fragments. As they dropped from
the razor on the floor, he stamped on them, and ground them under his
foot. "Go, wife of my bosom," he cried, with a dreadful mockery of voice
a