Confident that my noble impulses must have communicated themselves to my host, I looked up from my plate and searched his face for signs of abating rigour. I was disappointed. But should I forego or even postpone my atonement because he was stiff-necked? Only it was difficult to begin. At last I ventured.

‘Gertrude is really very fond of you, you know.’

Dessert had been reached, and I, in token of amity and good-will, had helped myself to a glass of port wine.

For answer he fairly glared at me. ‘Fond of me!’ he shouted.

I was determined not to be browbeaten out of my kind offices.

‘That’s what I said; she has a great heart.’

‘If you mean,’ he replied, returning to his former tone, ‘that it has ample accommodation!—but your recommendations come too late; I have delegated her affections.’

‘To me?’ I asked, involuntarily.

He shook his head. ‘And in any case, why to you?’

‘Because I——’

‘Oh, no,’ he exclaimed passionately. ‘Did she deceive you—has she deceived you into believing that—that you are the alternative to me? You aren’t unique—you have your reduplications, scores of them!’

My head swam, but he went on, enjoying his triumph. ‘Why, no one ever told me about you! She herself only mentioned you once. You are the least—the least of all her lovers!’ His voice dropped. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Where should I be?’ I fatuously asked. But he went on without regarding me.

‘But I remember this house when its silence, its comfort, its isolation, its uniqueness were for us, Gertrude and me and... and for the people we invited. But we didn’t ask many—we preferred to be alone. And I thought at first she was alone,’ he wound up, ‘when I found her this evening.’

‘Then why,’ I asked, ‘did you send her away and not me?’

‘Ah,’ he replied with an accent of finality, ‘I wanted you.’

While he spoke he was cracking a nut with his fingers and it must have had sharp edges, for he stopped, wincing, and held the finger to his mouth.

‘I’ve hurt my nail,’ he said. ‘See?’

He pushed his hand towards me over the polished table. I watched it, fascinated, thinking it would stop; but still it came on, his body following, until if I hadn’t drawn back, it would have touched me, while his chin dropped to within an inch of the table, and one side of his face was pillowed against his upper arm.

‘It’s a handicap, isn’t it?’ he said, watching me from under his brows.

‘Indeed it is,’ I replied; for the fine acorn-shaped nail was terribly torn, a jagged rent revealing the quick, moist and gelatinous. ‘How did you manage to do that?’ I went on, trying not to look at the mutilation which he still held before my eyes.

‘Do you really want to know how I did it?’ he asked. He hadn’t moved, and his question, in its awkward irregular delivery, seemed to reflect the sprawled unnatural position of his body.

‘Do tell me,’ I said, and added, nervously jocular, ‘but first let me guess. Perhaps you met with an accident in the course of your professional activities, when you were mending the lights, I mean, in the library.’

At that he jumped to his feet. ‘You’re very warm,’ he said, ‘you almost burn. But come into the library with me, and I’ll tell you.’

I prepared to follow him.

But unaccountably he lingered, walked up and down a little, went to the fireplace and again (it was evidently a favourite relaxation) gently kicked the coals. Then he went to the library door, meaning apparently to open it, but he changed his mind and instead turned on the big lights of the dining-room. ‘Let’s see what it’s really like,’ he said. ‘I hate this half-light.’ The sudden illumination laid bare that great rich still room, so secure, so assured, so content. My host stood looking at it. He was fidgeting with his dinner-jacket and had so little self-control that, at every brush of the material with his damaged finger, he whimpered like a child. His face, now that I saw it fairly again, was twisted and disfigured with misery. There wasn’t one imaginable quality that he shared with his sumptuous possessions.

In the library darkness was absolute. My host preceded me, and in a moment I had lost all sense of even our relative positions. I backed against the wall, and by luck my groping fingers felt the switch. But its futile click only emphasized the darkness. I began to feel frightened, with an acute immediate alarm very different from my earlier apprehensions and forebodings. To add to my uneasiness my ears began to detect a sound, a small irregular sound; it might have been water dripping, yet it seemed too definitely consonantal for that; it was more like an inhuman whisper. ‘Speak up,’ I cried, ‘if you’re talking to me!’ But it had no more effect, my petulant outcry, than if it had fallen on the ears of the dead. The disquieting noise persisted, but another note had crept into it—a soft labial sound, like the licking of lips. It wasn’t intelligible, it wasn’t even articulate, yet I felt that if I listened longer it would become both. I couldn’t bear the secret colloquy; and though it seemed to be taking place all round me, I made a rush into what I took to be the middle of the room. I didn’t get very far, however. A chair sent me sprawling, and when I picked myself up it was to the accompaniment of a more familiar sound. The curtains were being drawn apart and the moonlight, struggling in, showed me shapes of furniture and my own position, a few feet from the door. It showed me something else, too.

How could my host be drawing the curtains when I could see him lounging, relaxed and careless, in an armchair that, from its position by the wall, missed the moon’s directer ray? I strained my eyes. Very relaxed, very careless he must be, after what had passed between us, to stare at me so composedly over his shoulder, no, more than that, over his very back! He faced me, though his shoulder, oddly enough, was turned away. Perhaps he had practised it—a contortionist’s trick to bewilder his friends. Suddenly I heard his voice, not from the armchair at all but from the window.

‘Do you know now?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘How I hurt my finger?’

‘No,’ I cried untruthfully, for that very moment all my fears told me.

‘I did it strangling my wife!’

I rushed towards the window, only to be driven back by what seemed a solid body of mingled sleet and wind. I heard the creak of the great casement before it whirled outwards, crashing against the mullion and shattering the glass. But though I fought my way to the opening I wasn’t quick enough. Sixty feet below the eroding sea sucked, spouted and roared. Out of it jags of rock seemed to rise, float for a moment and then be dragged under the foam. Time after time great arcs of spray sprang hissing from the sea, lifted themselves to the window as though impelled by an insatiable curiosity, condensed and fell away. The drops were bitter on my lips. Soaked to the skin and stiff with cold, I turned to the room. The heavy brocade curtains flapped madly or rose and streamed level with the ceiling, and through the general uproar I could distinguish separate sounds, the clattering fall of small objects and the banging and scraping of pictures against the walls. The whole weatherproof, soundproof house seemed to be ruining in, to be given up to darkness and furies . . . and to me. But not wholly, not unreservedly, to me. Mrs. Santander was still at her place in the easy chair.