He rose with a sigh, stretched himself, and after turning out the lights in the drawing-room, went downstairs to the library, intending to do an hour’s work before going to bed. He lit a cigarette, sat down, and opened the brief-bag that he had brought home. With a handful of documents, he drew out an unopened evening paper. He arrayed the documents before him, then unfolded the newspaper, and leaning back in his chair glanced idly up and down the columns. Suddenly his eye became riveted to the page, his face grew white, and then he fell forward, elbows on table, and sat staring in front of him, digging his nails into his cheeks. His back was to the door. He was not conscious that Irene, in dressing-gown and with loose hair, had entered the room. “Did I leave my book down here?” she asked, mentioning a new novel. The sound of her voice startled him. He turned round, dazed. She came towards him, caught sight of his face beneath the shaded gas-light, and uttered a little cry of fear, for it was ghastly, and his eyes were bloodshot. He beckoned her. She approached and read over his shoulder the lines to which his finger pointed. “A tragic sequel to the celebrated Sunnington murder is reported from Nice. Miss Minna Hart, the daughter of the late Israel Hart, Esquire, was found dead in her bed this morning. An empty bottle that had contained chloral was found by her bedside. Whether death was the result of an accident or not is not yet ascertained.” But they knew. He turned in his chair, and they looked in silence at one another. The dead girl seemed to rise up between them. For a moment they were strangers. “It was I that killed her,” he said. “Yes, it was you.” The words came mechanically from her lips. They crushed the man who lay back in his chair, broken and helpless, with all the old pride gone. “Then I had better follow her,” he said, staring moodily in front of him. There was a long, long silence. Irene looked at him, her hand to her breast as if to suppress tumultuous workings. In the second and greater crash of her illusions she had not felt the spasm of horror and revulsion. She had only mourned the desecration of the sun in her heaven. Her idol had been transmuted into clay, and she had seen herself bereft of the god to whom she referred all the promptings of her soul. Her chief sensation had been amazed self-pity, in which her broader sympathies had no part. The moment of utter separation from him brought a flash of insight, and she saw him as he was, a man confessed--erring, high-minded, weak, patching up honour with dishonour, striving after noble ends by base means, a contrast of opposites, a fusion of granite and “a measure of shifting sand, from under the feet of the years.” “I have made a ghastly failure of life,” he said, “but I can’t live without your love.”