The picture Hazelton was painting for his own signature was dark and magnificent, but the picture which he was painting for De Vilmarte had a singular radiance. It was as though at last Hazelton had painted the impossible; light shone from that picture. Yet it was not finished. Days passed, and Hazelton had not brought the picture further toward completion. One day when De Vilmarte came in he found Hazelton brooding before it. He had been drinking. Tears were in his eyes. “It is too beautiful—too beautiful! Light is more beautiful than darkness. The taste for the black, the menacing, is the decadent appreciation of a too sheltered world. I cannot finish this picture for another to sign.” “No,” De Vilmarte soothed him, “of course not.” “Oh, my beautiful!” cried Hazelton, addressing his picture. “I cannot finish you! Come, De Vilmarte, we will drink.” De Vilmarte went with Hazelton. He watched over him as a mother over her child. He talked; he reasoned; he sat quiet, white-lipped, while Hazelton would speculate as to what De Vilmarte got out of it. “You are, I think, like the victim of a drug,” he said, jeering at De Vilmarte, his brilliant eyes agleam. That was truer than Hazelton knew. He could not stop. His mother, his fiancée, his friends, the critics, his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes pushing him on to some doom of whose exact nature he was ignorant. Again it was to him as though they dug a dark channel in which his life had to flow. Meantime he had to nurse Hazelton’s sick spirit along. He would go with him as he drank, stand by him in his studio, urging him to paint. In this way they spent hideous days together. Hazelton developed a passion for torture. He was tortured himself. Alcohol tortured him, his embittered nature tortured him. He loved to see De Vilmarte writhe. He was torn between his desire to finish the picture and the anguish which he felt at seeing it about to pass into another’s hands. There were days when its existence hung in the balance. “You see this palette-knife,” he would tell De Vilmarte, “and this palette of dark paint? A twist, my friend, a little twist of the knife and a little splash, and where is this luminous radiance? Gone!” And he would watch De Vilmarte as he let his brush hover over the brilliant surface. How it hurt Raoul he knew, because when he thought of destroying the picture it was as though a knife were twisted in his own heart. One afternoon De Vilmarte nursed Hazelton from café to café, listening to his noble braggadocio. “Remember,” Hazelton urged Raoul, “the wonderful Mongolian legend of the father and son who loved the same woman, and whom for their honor they threw over a cliff! That’s the idea—the cliff! You shall throw our love over the cliff—you shall destroy the picture yourself. Come back with me!” He was as though possessed. Full of apprehension, De Vilmarte followed him.