After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of the man 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 a scientist.  You know about chemistry, and things of that kind.  You have made experiments.  What you have got to do is to destroy the [90] thing that is up-stairs,—­to destroy it so that not a vestige will be left of it.  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.”

“You are mad, Dorian.”

“Ah!  I was waiting for you to call me Dorian.”

“You are mad, I tell you,—­mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession.  I will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is.  Do you think I am going to peril my reputation for you?  What is it to me what devil’s work you are up to?”

“It was a suicide, Alan.”

“I am glad of that.  But who drove him to it?  You, I should fancy.”

“Do you still refuse to do this, for me?”

“Of course I refuse.  I will have absolutely nothing to do with it.  I don’t care what shame comes on you.  You deserve it all.  I should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced.  How dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror?  I should have thought you knew more about people’s characters.  Your friend Lord Henry Wotton can’t have taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you.  Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.  You have come to the wrong man.  Go to some of your friends.  Don’t come to me.”

“Alan, it was murder.  I killed him.  You don’t know what he had made me suffer.  Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or the marring of it than poor Harry has had.  He may not have intended it, the result was the same.”