“Yes, they went back. That was eight years ago?” Hoyting began to count up the continents on his fingers. “Australia last year--South America--Siberia--the Transvaal, before that. Yes, it would have been eight years ago.” To my surprise, I found myself reluctant to bring out the truth. Hoyting, as he talked, had been so vividly aware of the Dorriens, had made it so evident how real to him and repellent was that remembered scene, that my hesitation was not unnatural. “He practised at home for a number of years, doing some research when he had time. He went back into public work to some extent--boards and commissions again. Her family seemed to manage him entirely.” Then I stopped. Hoyting waited. The lights in the harbor began to lessen, great patches of shadow spacing them. I waited, too, to gather strength. It had all become horrible to me now, and permeated with the sordidness that spoils tragedy. “He shot himself.” “He cared so much as that?” Hoyting’s huge finger flicked off the cigarette ash before there was need. “He had--oh, I only heard it, Hoyting!” I cried. “I don’t know the whole of it. Who does? But those damned Hewells took it up--I suppose by way of condoning the suicide--and made a martyr of him.” “Go on.” “He had somehow in the laboratory--you know the danger; and Dorrien was a reckless chap, those last years, not like himself, his friends said. They all used to worry over his riding, his shooting, his yachting--everything.” I broke off. It was extremely hard to tell the man who apparently knew most about Dorrien, even though he had never called Dorrien friend. “He had somehow, through a cut, the slip of an instrument--I don’t know the sickening scientific detail of it--inoculated himself with a disease he was working with. He made nothing of it at the time, I’m told. Everybody had forgotten it. Suddenly--when he found out what he was in for, I suppose--he shot himself. After what you’ve told me, I should say it was probably from disgust. Why blame him?” “What was it?” Hoyting had not stirred, but his voice had changed immeasurably. “Tuberculosis.” The great shoulders shrugged once. I felt impelled to explain--a miserable little feverish strut. And before Hoyting, of all men! “It gives the measure of his revolt--a man who had cured so many, and could have cured himself mechanically, you might say; a man whose special business in life had been to snap his fingers at that particular plague. That’s why, until you told me all this, I never understood. Now it’s clear enough.” I shut my eyes, glad to put the ironic thing away, glad to be at peace, with no further need to speak of it. When I opened them again, I was alone. Hoyting, the foot-loose, was gone. THE CASE OF PARAMORE