With a confident and satisfied smile Mr. Mappin, the celebrated surgeon, looked round the little group of which he was the centre at Glencader, Rudyard Byng’s castle in Wales.

Rudyard blinked at him for a moment with ironical amusement, then remarked:  “When you want to die, does it matter much whether you kill yourself with a bludgeon or a pin, take gas from a tap or cyanide of potassium, jump in front of a railway train or use the revolting razor?  You are dead neither less nor more, and the shock to the world is the same.  It’s only the housemaid or the undertaker that notices any difference.  I knew a man at Vleifontein who killed himself by jumping into the machinery of a mill.  It gave a lot of trouble to all concerned.  That was what he wanted—­to end his own life and exasperate the foreman.”

“Rudyard, what a horrible tale!” exclaimed his wife, turning again to the surgeon, eagerly.  “It is most interesting, and I see what you mean.  It is, that if we only really knew, we could take our own lives or other people’s with such ease and skill that it would be hard to detect it?”

The surgeon nodded.  “Exactly, Mrs. Byng.  I don’t say that the expert couldn’t find what the cause of death was, if suspicion was aroused; but it could be managed so that ‘heart failure’ or some such silly verdict would be given, because there was no sign of violence, or of injury artificially inflicted.”

“It is fortunate the world doesn’t know these ways to euthanasia,” interposed Stafford.  “I fancy that murders would be more numerous than suicides, however.  Suicide enthusiasts would still pursue their melodramatic indulgences—­disfiguring themselves unnecessarily.”

Adrian Fellowes, the amiable, ever-present secretary and “chamberlain” of Rudyard’s household, as Jasmine teasingly called him, whose handsome, unintellectual face had lighted with amusement at the conversation, now interposed.  “Couldn’t you give us some idea how it can be done, this smooth passage of the Styx?” he asked.  “We’ll promise not to use it.”

The surgeon looked round the little group reflectively.  His eyes passed from Adrian to Jasmine, who stood beside him, to Byng, and to Ian Stafford, and stimulated by their interest, he gave a pleased smile of gratified vanity.  He was young, and had only within the past three years got to the top of the tree at a bound, by a certain successful operation in royal circles.

Drawing out of his pocket a small case, he took from it a needle and held it up.  “Now that doesn’t look very dangerous, does it?” he asked.  “Yet a firm pressure of its point could take a life, and there would be little possibility of finding how the ghastly trick was done except by the aroused expert.”

“If you will allow me,” he said, taking Jasmine’s hand and poising the needle above her palm.  “Now, one tiny thrust of this steel point, which has been dipped in a certain acid, would kill Mrs. Byng as surely as though she had been shot through the heart.  Yet it would leave scarcely the faintest sign.  No blood, no wound, just a tiny pin-prick, as it were; and who would be the wiser?  Imagine an average coroner’s jury and the average examination of the village doctor, who would die rather than expose his ignorance, and therefore gives ’heart failure’ as the cause of death.”