he
might refuse to come. What could he do then? Every moment was of
vital importance.

They had been great friends once, five years before--almost
inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan
Campbell never did.

He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the
beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His
dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had
spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken
a good class in the Natural Science Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was
still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his
own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the
annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for
Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up
prescriptions. He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and
played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. In
fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray
together--music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to
be able to exercise whenever he wished--and, indeed, exercised often
without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshire's the
night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always
seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on. For
eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell was always either at
Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To him, as to many others, Dorian
Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in
life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one
ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when
they met and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any
party at which Dorian Gray was present. He had changed, too--was
strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing
music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was
called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time
left in which to practise. And this was certainly true. Every day he
seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once
or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain
curious experime