“No,” I answered in some surprise; for Challoner had always seemed to me the very type of the solitary, self-contained bachelor.

“I have never mentioned it,” said he.  “The subject would have been a painful one.  It is not now.  The malice of sorrow and misfortune loses its power as I near the end of my pilgrimage.  Soon I shall step across the border and be out of its jurisdiction forever.”

He paused, lit his cigar, took a few labored draughts of the fragrant smoke, and resumed:  “I did not marry until I was turned forty.  I had no desire to.  I was a solitary man, full of my scientific interests and not at all susceptible to the influence of women.  But at last I met my late wife and found her different from all other women whom I had seen.  She was a beautiful girl, some twenty years younger than I, highly intelligent, cultivated and possessed of considerable property.  Of course I was no match for her.  I was nothing to look at, was double her age, was only moderately well off and had no special standing either socially or in the world of science.  But she married me and, as I may say, she married me handsomely; by which I mean that she always treated our marriage as a great stroke of good fortune for her, as if the advantages were all on her side instead of on mine.  As a result, we were absolutely devoted to each other.  Our life was all that married life could be and that it so seldom is.  We were inseparable.  In our work, in our play, in every interest and occupation, we were in perfect harmony.  We grudged the briefest moment of separation and avoided all society because we were so perfectly happy with each other.  She was a wife in a million; and it was only after I had married her that I realized what a delightful thing it was to be alive.  My former existence, looked back on from that time, seemed but a blank expanse through which I had stagnated as a chrysalis lingers on, half alive, through the dreary months of winter.

“We lived thus in unbroken concord, with mutual love that grew from day to day, until two years of perfect happiness had passed.

“And then the end came.”

Here Challoner paused, and a look of unutterable sadness settled on his poor, misshapen face.  I watched him with an uncomfortable premonition of something disagreeable in the sequel of his narrative as, with his trembling, puffy hand, he re-lighted the cigar that had gone out in the interval.

“The end came,” he repeated presently.  “The perfect happiness of two human beings was shattered in a moment.  Let me describe the circumstances.

“I am usually a light sleeper, like most men of an active mind, but on this occasion I must have slept more heavily than usual.  I awoke, however, with somewhat of a start and the feeling that something had happened.  I immediately missed my wife and sat up in bed to listen.  Faint creakings and sounds of movement were audible from below and I was about to get up and investigate when a door slammed, a bell rang loudly and then the report of a pistol or gun echoed through the house.