He put off his fur coat, and let it fall on the deck, and stood for a while as if wrapt in ecstasy.  Then, before Lefevre could conceive his intention, his feet were together on the bulwark, and with a flash and a plunge he was gone!

Amazement held the doctor’s energies congealed, though but for an instant or two.  Then he threw off hat and coat, and stood alert and resolute to dive to Julius’s rescue when he rose, while those who manned the yacht prepared to cast a buoy and line.  Not a ripple or flash of water passed unheeded; the flood of sunshine rose fuller and fuller over the world; moments grew to minutes, and minutes swelled to hopeless hours under the doctor’s weary eyes, till it seemed to them as if the universe were only a swirling, greedy ocean;—­but no sign appeared of his night’s companion:  his life was quenched in the depths of the restless waters, as a flaming meteor is quenched in night.  At length Lefevre ordered the yacht to stand away to the shore, his heart torn with grief and self-upbraiding.  He had called Courtney his friend, and yet until that last he had never won his inner confidence; and now he knew that his friend—­he of the gentle heart, the peerless intelligence, and the wildly erring life—­was dead in the hour of self-redemption.

When he had landed, however, given to the proper authorities such information as was necessary, and set off by train on his return to town, the agitation of his grief began to assuage; and when next day, upon the publication in the papers of the news of Courtney’s death by drowning, a solicitor called in Savile Row with a will which he had drawn up two days before, and by which all Julius Courtney’s property was left to Dr Lefevre, to dispose of as he thought best, “for scientific and humane ends,” the doctor admitted to his reason that a death that could thus calmly be prepared was not lightly to be questioned.

“He must have known best,” he said to himself, as he bowed over his hands—­“he must have known best when to put off the poisoned garment of life he had woven for himself.”