who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions.  He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs.  In fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray together,—­music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished, and indeed exercised often without being conscious of it.  They had met at Lady Berkshire’s the night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always seen together at the Opera, and wherever good music was going on.  For eighteen months their intimacy lasted.  Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square.  To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life.  Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one ever knew.  But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when [89] they met, and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present.  He had changed, too,—­ was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing music of any passionate character, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise.  And this was certainly true.  Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious experiments.

This was the man that Dorian Gray was waiting for, pacing up and down the room, glancing every moment at the clock, and becoming horribly agitated as the minutes went by.  At last the door opened, and his servant entered.

“Mr. Alan Campbell, sir.”

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

“Ask him to come in at once, Francis.”

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 appeared not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.

“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.