ther attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara
could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the
temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by
disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken
likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has
the secret--but she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
uncertainty.

Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I, when I
went through the place in order to make arrangements for closing it
altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the condemned cell where
Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been sacrosanct; not a thing had
been disturbed; there was the iron safe empty, but yet a grim receptacle
of abominable secrets; the quill pen, its point stained with idle ink,
lay on the office writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there
under a clump of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in
the corner stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a
syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated
it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had
affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the
cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting
despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. But now
Doria knew. He had lost her love, the rock on which he had built his
hope of salvation. He was damned to eternity. It is the supreme and
unspeakable horror of eternal life that you cannot dash your head
against a wall and plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful
Presence of Adrian was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly
walls. . . .

I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again. Of
course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not have
slept in that flat for anything in the world.

I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in
order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had
ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old
portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I
did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the tragic
lumber to Northlands, and having made a bonfire in a corner of the
ki