“What?”

“Why, that after ruining me, you have missed being happy!”

He sighed impatiently, and his eyes, though he kept them fastened on mine, seemed to be tiring.  “I thought,” he said, “I could time your intelligence over any fence.  But to-night there’s something wrong.  Either I’m out of practice or your brain has been going to the deuce.  What, man!  You’re shying at every bank!  Is it drink, hey?  Or hunger?”

“It might be a little of both,” I answered.  “But stay a moment and let me get things straight.  I stood between you and Elaine—­no, give me time—­between you and your aims, whatever they were.  Very well.  You trod over me; or, rather, you pulled me up by the roots and pitched me into outer darkness to rot.  And now it seems that, after all, you are not content.  In the devil’s name, why?”

“Why?  Oh, cannot you see? . . .  Take a look at these mirrors again—­ our world, I tell you.  See—­you and I—­you and I—­always you and I!  Man, I pitched you into darkness as you say, and then I woke and knew the truth—­that you were necessary to me.”

“Hey?”

“I can’t do without you!” It broke from him in a cry.  “So help me God, Reggie, it is the truth!”

I stared in his face for half a minute maybe, and broke out laughing.  “Jeshurun waxed fat and—­turned sentimental!  A nice copy-book job you make of it, too!”

    “Oh, send my brother back to me—­
    I cannot play alone!”

“Perhaps you’d like me to buy a broom and hire the crossing in Lennox Gardens?  Then you’d be able to contemplate me all day long, and nourish your fine fat soul with delicate eating.  Pah!  You make me sick.”

“It’s the truth,” said he quietly.

“It may be.  To me it looks a sight more like foie gras.  Can’t do without me, can’t you?  Well, I can jolly well do without you, and I’m going to.”

“I warn you,” he said:  “I have done you an injury or two in my time, but by George if I stand up and let you shoot me—­well, I hate you badly enough, but I won’t let you do it without fair warning.”

“I’ll risk it anyway,” said I.

“Very well.”  He stood up, and folded his arms.  “Shoot, then, and be hanged!”

I put out my hand to the revolver, hesitated, and withdrew it.

“That’s not the way,” I said.  “I’ve got my code, as I told you before.”

“Does the code forbid suicide?” he asked.

“That’s a different thing.”

“Not at all.  The man who commits suicide kills an unarmed man.”

“But the unarmed man happens to be himself.”

“Suppose that in this instance your distinction won’t work?  Look here,” he went on, as I pushed back my chair impatiently, “I have one truth more for you.  I swear I believe that what we have hated, we two, is not each other, but ourselves or our own likeness.  I swear I believe we two have so shared natures in hate that no power can untwist and separate them to render each his own.  But I swear also I believe that if you lift that revolver to kill, you will take aim, not at me, but by instinct at a worse enemy—­yourself, vital in my heart.”