She had been seen about with him, constantly, in all sorts of places, and that London that knew him was beginning to talk. Of this Rita was perfectly unconscious. He had written to his wife at Nice, letters so falsely sympathetic that he felt she must suspect something. He followed up every letter with a long, costly telegram. A telegram is not autograph and the very lesions of the prose conceal the lesions of the sender's dull intention. His physical state was beginning to be so alarming that he was putting himself constantly under the influence of bromide and such-like drugs. He went regularly to the Turkish Bath in Jermyn Street, had his face greased and hammered in the Haymarket each morning, and fought with a constantly growing terror against an advancing horror which he trembled to think might not be far off now. Delirium Tremens. But when Rita met him at night, drugs, massage and alcohol had had their influence and kept him still upon the brink. In his well-cut evening clothes, with his face a little fatter, a little redder perhaps, he was still her clever, debonnair Gilbert. A necessity to her now. CHAPTER IV THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS "Let us have a quiet hour, Let us hob-and-nob with Death." --_Tennyson._ Three weeks passed. There was no change in the relations of Rita Wallace and Gilbert Lothian. She was gay, tender, silent by turns, and her thirst for pleasure seemed unquenchable. She yielded nothing. Things were as they were. He was married: there was no more to be said, they must "dree their wierd"--endure their lot. Often the man smiled bitterly to hear her girlish wisdom, uttered with almost complacent finality. It was not very difficult for _her_ to endure. She had no conception of the dreadful state into which he had come, the torture he suffered. When he was alone--during the long evil day when he could not see her--the perspiration his heated blood sent out upon his face and body seemed like the very night dews of the grave. He was the sensualist of whom Ruskin speaks, the sensualist with the shroud about his feet. All day long he fought for sufficient mastery over himself to go through the evening, fought against the feverish disease of parched throat and wandering eyes; senseless, dissolute, merciless. And one dreadful flame burned steadily in the surrounding gloom-- "_Love, which is lust, is the lamp in the tomb. Love, which is lust, is the call from the gloom._" "Je me nourris de flammes" was the proud motto of an ancient ducal house in Burgundy. With grimmer meaning Lothian might have taken it for his own during these days. He had heard from his wife that she was coming home almost at once. Lady Davidson had rallied. There was every prospect of her living for a month or two more. Sir Harold Davidson was on his way home from India. He would go to her at once and it was now as certain as such things can be that he would be in time.