“Where are you going to?” asked Rosie. “I am merely going,” answered Jetsam. “But you will tell me where?” she insisted. “It is vague,” he replied. “Out of your life--that is all I can say. It was too much to hope that at the end of a career which has been one long and uninterrupted misfortune the sun of happiness should shine on me. I was destined to failure from the beginning. You do not know all my story; but you know some of it--enough to enable you, perhaps, to forgive me. Good-bye!” He moved to the door. “You will not leave me like that,” said Rosie. “You dare not leave me like that. You are going to kill yourself.” “No,” he said. “I have got over that caprice, I think. I shall drag out my existence to its natural end.” “Give me your address,” Rosie said doggedly. He shook his head. “You are cruel,” she whimpered. “After----” She was interrupted by Ilam himself, who said: “Rosie, go downstairs. I have two words to speak to this fellow. Go downstairs. Leave us.” His tone was cold and acid. “Yes,” Jetsam agreed after a moment. “Leave us; we have to speak to each other.” “You will not go without seeing me?” asked Rosie. “I will not,” replied Jetsam, and the next instant the two men were alone together in the room, save for the unconscious form of Mrs. Ilam. The door had been locked again, this time by Ilam. “She is in love with you,” Ilam shouted fiercely. “You have imposed on her; you have taken advantage of her ignorance of life, and she is in love with you! It is infamous. I am stronger than you, and unless you promise me----” “Idiot!” Jetsam stopped him. “What are you raving about? You must be mad. You must have forgotten--as your mother forgets. As for this poor girl being in love with me-----” He stopped with a hard laugh. “What has that to do with you?” “It has everything to do with me,” cried Ilam, and, as if transported by fury, he suddenly sprang on Jetsam, who was all unprepared, and, clasping him in a murderous embrace, threw him to the ground. “I’ve had enough of you,” he ground out the words through his teeth. “And if I finish you, I can easily show that it was in self-defence.” And he had scarcely spoken when his hands fell lax in astonishment and alarm, for immediately outside the window, or so it seemed, there sounded four notes of a trombone, brazen, clear, and imposing in the night. No one who has heard Beethoven’s greatest symphony will ever forget the four notes--commonly called the notes of fate--with which the most tremendous of musical compositions opens. It was these notes which the trombone had given forth. There was a silence, and the instrument repeated them, and in the next pause that followed, the two men who an instant before had been joined in a dreadful struggle, lay moveless, listening to their own breathing; and a third time the trombone sounded. CHAPTER XXVIII--The Dead March