The film was gathering fast upon those eyes once so full of laughter; but through it they gazed in passionate appeal.  For answer, my love bent gravely over the bed and with her lips met his; then, still clasping his hand, sank on her knees beside the bed.

“Thank God!  My love—­oh, let me call you that—­you cannot—­help—­my loving you.  Do not pray—­I am happy now and—­they are waiting for you.”

Slowly Claire arose to her feet and stood waiting for his last word—­

“They are waiting—­waiting.  Good-bye, Jasper—­old friend—­and Clarissa—­Clarissa—­my love—­they are waiting—­I cannot come—­Clar—­”

Slowly Claire bent and once more touched his lips, then without a word passed slowly out.  As she went Death entered and found on its victim’s face a changeless, rapturous smile.

So “Francesca” was played a second time and, as the papers said next morning, with even more perfect art and amid more awed enthusiasm than on the first night.  But as the piece went on, a rumour passed through the house that its young author was dead—­suddenly and mysteriously dead while the dawn of his fame was yet breaking—­struck down, some said, outside the theatre by a rival, while others whispered that he had taken poison, but none knew for certain.  Only, as Claire passed from one heart-shaking scene to another, the rumour grew and grew, so that when the curtain fell the audience parted in awed and murmured speculations.

And all the while I was kneeling beside the body of my murdered friend.

A week had passed and I was standing with Claire beside Tom’s grave.  We had met and spoken at the funeral, but some restraint had lain upon our tongues.  For myself, I was still as one who had sold his brother for a price, and Claire had forborne from questioning my grief.

The coroner’s jury had brought in a verdict of “Murder by a certain person unknown,” and now the police were occupied in following such clues as I could give them.  All the daily papers assigned robbery as the motive, and the disappearance of Tom’s watch-chain gave plausibility to the theory.  But I knew too well why that chain had disappeared, and even in my grief found consolation in the thought of Colliver’s impotent rage when he should come to examine his prize.  I had described the face and figure of my enemy and had even identified him with the long-missing sailor Georgio Rhodojani, so that they promised to lay hands on him in a very short space.  But the public knew nothing of this.  The only effect of the newspapers’ version of the murder was to send the town crowding in greater numbers than ever to see the dead man’s play.

Since the first night of “Francesca,” Claire and I had only met by Tom’s bedside and at his funeral.  But as I entered the gloomy cemetery that afternoon I spied a figure draped in black beside the yet unsettled mound, and as I drew near knew it to be Claire.