In one important respect, the later portion of the manuscript differed from the pages which he had just been reading.  Signs of an overwrought brain showed themselves, here and there, as the outline of the play approached its end.  The handwriting grew worse and worse.  Some of the longer sentences were left unfinished.  In the exchange of dialogue, questions and answers were not always attributed respectively to the right speaker.  At certain intervals the writer’s failing intelligence seemed to recover itself for a while; only to relapse again, and to lose the thread of the narrative more hopelessly than ever.

After reading one or two of the more coherent passages Henry recoiled from the ever-darkening horror of the story.  He closed the manuscript, heartsick and exhausted, and threw himself on his bed to rest.  The door opened almost at the same moment.  Lord Montbarry entered the room.

‘We have just returned from the Opera,’ he said; ’and we have heard the news of that miserable woman’s death.  They say you spoke to her in her last moments; and I want to hear how it happened.’

‘You shall hear how it happened,’ Henry answered; ’and more than that.  You are now the head of the family, Stephen; and I feel bound, in the position which oppresses me, to leave you to decide what ought to be done.’

With those introductory words, he told his brother how the Countess’s play had come into his hands.  ‘Read the first few pages,’ he said.  ’I am anxious to know whether the same impression is produced on both of us.’

Before Lord Montbarry had got half-way through the First Act, he stopped, and looked at his brother.  ’What does she mean by boasting of this as her own invention?’ he asked.  ’Was she too crazy to remember that these things really happened?’

This was enough for Henry:  the same impression had been produced on both of them.  ‘You will do as you please,’ he said.  ’But if you will be guided by me, spare yourself the reading of those pages to come, which describe our brother’s terrible expiation of his heartless marriage.’

‘Have you read it all, Henry?’

’Not all.  I shrank from reading some of the latter part of it.  Neither you nor I saw much of our elder brother after we left school; and, for my part, I felt, and never scrupled to express my feeling, that he behaved infamously to Agnes.  But when I read that unconscious confession of the murderous conspiracy to which he fell a victim, I remembered, with something like remorse, that the same mother bore us.  I have felt for him to-night, what I am ashamed to think I never felt for him before.’

Lord Montbarry took his brother’s hand.

‘You are a good fellow, Henry,’ he said; ’but are you quite sure that you have not been needlessly distressing yourself?  Because some of this crazy creature’s writing accidentally tells what we know to be the truth, does it follow that all the rest is to be relied on to the end?’