by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.  Then, suddenly, time stopped for him.  Yes:  that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him.  He stared at it.  Its very horror made him stone.

At last the door opened and his servant entered.  He turned glazed eyes upon him.

“Mr. Campbell, sir,” said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back to his cheeks.

“Ask him to come in at once, Francis.”  He felt that he was himself again.  His mood of cowardice had passed away.

The man bowed and retired.  In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in, looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

“Alan!  This is kind of you.  I thank you for coming.”

“I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray.  But you said it was a matter of life and death.”  His voice was hard and cold.  He spoke with slow deliberation.  There was a look of contempt in the steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.  He kept his hands in the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.

“Yes:  it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one person.  Sit down.”

Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him.  The two men’s eyes met.  In Dorian’s there was infinite pity.  He knew that what he was going to do was dreadful.

After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he had sent for, “Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.  He has been dead ten hours now.  Don’t stir, and don’t look at me like that.  Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not concern you.  What you have to do is this—­”

“Stop, Gray.  I don’t want to know anything further.  Whether what you have told me is true or not true doesn’t concern me.  I entirely decline to be mixed up in your life.  Keep your horrible secrets to yourself.  They don’t interest me any more.”

“Alan, they will have to interest you.  This one will have to interest you.  I am awfully sorry for you, Alan.  But I can’t help myself.  You are the one man who is able to save me.  I am forced to bring you into the matter.  I have no option.  Alan, you are scientific.  You know about chemistry and things of that kind.  You have made experiments.  What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs—­ to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left.  Nobody saw this person come into the house.  Indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in Paris.  He will not be missed for months.  When he is missed, there must be no trace of him found here.  You, Alan, you must change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that I may scatter in the air.”