"No. Not now. But I should be obliged if you will tell him that I shall want him in an hour. I shall try and read for a while by the fire." * * * * * Richard Maule waited till he heard the sounds of his cousin's quick footsteps die away. Then he rose feebly and walked over to the recess which had been fitted up as a medicine cupboard in the days of his childhood, when drugs were more the fashion than they are now. In a wide-necked, glass-stoppered bottle were the crystals of chloral which he had long used in preference to the more usual liquid form. He knew to a nicety the dose which he himself could take with safety, the dose which sometimes failed to induce sleep. He now measured out in his hand some three times his usual dose. Had Dick Wantele's answer been different, Richard Maule would have administered to himself the crystals he now held in his hand. But Dick's decision--what the man of average morality would have regarded as his noble and unselfish decision--had signed another human being's death-warrant. The thought that this was so suddenly struck Richard Maule as the most ironic of the many avenging things he had known to happen in our strange world. And, almost for the first time since he had formed his awful conception of the meaning of life, he knew the cruel joy of laughing with the gods, instead of writhing under their lash. As he shook the crystals into an envelope and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, he told himself that revenge was at last to be his. The gods were yielding him one of their most cherished attributes. CHAPTER XIX "The fact that the world contains an appreciable number of wretches who ought to be exterminated without mercy when an opportunity occurs, is not quite so generally understood as it ought to be, and many common ways of thinking and feeling virtually deny it." Richard Maule turned the handle of his wife's bedroom door. A glance assured him that the beautiful room was empty. So far the gods whose sport he believed himself to be had been kind, for he had met no one during his slow, painful progress through the house, and Athena, as he knew well, would not be up for another hour. Standing just within the door, he looked round the room with a terrible, almost a malignant, curiosity. The fire had evidently just been built up; it threw dancing shafts of light over the rose-red curtains of the low First Empire bed, at once vivifying and softening the brilliant colouring of the room. Till to-night, the owner of Rede Place had never seen this oval bedchamber since it had been transformed nearly nine years before in view of the home-coming of his wife--the home-coming which had been delayed for two years after their marriage.