Ralph’s unspoken condemnation had hurt him cruelly.  He could have borne words, he thought, better than that look on his son’s face.  For the first time, he realised how much he had cared for Ralph; how much—­God help him!—­he cared for him still.

Yet above it all, dominant, compelling, was man’s supreme passion—­that for his mate.  As Evelina moved before him in her unveiled beauty, his hungry soul leaped to meet hers.  Now, strangely, he loved her as he had loved her in the long ago, yet with an added grace.  There was an element in his love that had never been there before—­the mysterious bond which welds more firmly into one, two who have suffered together.

He hungered for Ralph—­for the strong young arm thrown about his shoulders in friendly fashion, for the eager, boyish laugh, the hearty word.  He hungered for Evelina, radiant with a beauty no woman had ever worn before.  Far past the promise of her girlhood, the noble, transfigured face, with its glory of lustreless white hair, set his pulses to throbbing wildly.  And subtly, unconsciously, but not the less surely, he hungered for death.

Anthony Dexter had cherished no sentiment about the end of life; to him it had seemed much the same as the stopping of a clock, and of as little moment.  He had failed to see why such a fuss was made about the inevitable, though he had at times been scientifically interested in the hysterical effect he had produced in a household by announcing that within an hour or so a particular human clock might be expected to stop.  It had never occurred to him, either, that a man had not a well-defined right to stop the clock of his own being whenever it seemed desirable or expedient.

Now he thought of death as the final, beautiful solution of all mundane problems.  If he were dead, Ralph could not look at him with contempt; the veiled—­or unveiled—­Evelina could not haunt him as she had, remorselessly, for months.  Yes, death was beautiful, and he well knew how to make it sure.

By an incredibly swift transition, his pain passed into an exquisite pleasure.  The woman he loved was walking in the hall before him; the son he loved was downstairs.  What man could have more?

  “For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
    The black minute’s at end,
  And the elements’ rage, the fiend voices that rave,
    Shall dwindle, shall blend,
  Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
    Then a light, then thy breast—­
  Oh thou soul of my soul, I shall clasp thee again,
    And with God be the rest!”

The wonderful words sang themselves over in his consciousness.  He smiled and the unveiled Evelina smiled back at him, with infinite tenderness, infinite love.  To-night he would sleep as he had not slept before—­in the sleep that knows no waking.

He had the tiny white tablets, plenty of them, but the fancy seized him to taste this last bitterness to the full.  He took a wine glass from his chiffonier—­those white, blunt fingers had never been more steady than now.  He lifted the vial on high and poured out the laudanum, faltering no more than when he had guided the knife in an operation that made him famous throughout the State.