So this was the end of it all—­friendship gone with the man before him; shame come to the woman he loved; misery to every one; a home-life shattered; and from the souls of three people peace banished for evermore.

He opened out the pages with a slowness that seemed almost apathy, while the man opposite clinched his hands on the table spasmodically.  Still the music from the other room with cheap, flippant sensuousness stole through the burdened air: 

“Singing, it will flourish till the world’s last year—­”

He looked at the writing vaguely, blindly.  Why should this be exacted of him, this futile penalty?  Then all at once his sight cleared; for this handwriting was not his—­this letter was not his; these wild, passionate phrases—­this terrible suggestiveness of meaning, these references to the past, this appeal for further hours of love together, this abjectly tender appeal to Jasmine that she would wear one of his white roses when he saw her the next day—­would she not see him between eleven and twelve o’clock?—­all these words were not his.

They were written by the man who was playing the piano in the next room; by the man who had come and gone in this house like one who had the right to do so; who had, as it were, fed from Rudyard Byng’s hand; who lived on what Byng paid him; who had been trusted with the innermost life of the household and the life and the business of the master of it.

The letter was signed, Adrian.

His own face blanched like the face of the man before him.  He had braced himself to face the consequences of his own letter to the woman he loved, and he was face to face with the consequences of another man’s letter to the same woman, to the woman who had two lovers.  He was face to face with Rudyard’s tragedy, and with his own....  She, Jasmine, to whom he had given all, for whom he had been ready to give up all—­career, fame, existence—­was true to none, unfaithful to all, caring for none, but pretending to care for all three—­and for how many others?  He choked back a cry.

“Well—­well?” came the husband’s voice across the table.  “There’s one thing to do, and I mean to do it.”  He waved a hand towards the music-room.  “He’s in the next room there.  I mean to kill him—­to kill him—­now.  I wanted you to know why, to know all, you, Stafford, my old friend and hers.  And I’m going to do it now.  Listen to him there!”

His words came brokenly and scarce above a whisper, but they were ghastly in their determination, in their loathing, their blind fury.  He was gone mad, all the animal in him alive, the brain tossing on a sea of disorder.

“Now!” he said, suddenly, and, rising, he pushed back his chair.  “Give that to me.”

He reached out his hand for the letter, but his confused senses were suddenly arrested by the look in Ian Stafford’s face, a look so strange, so poignant, so insistent, that he paused.  Words could not have checked his blind haste like that look.  In the interval which followed, the music from the other room struck upon the ears of both, with exasperating insistence: