the way, what nonsense
that saying is, 'Dead men tell no tales!' Half the best
tales in the world are told, or at least completed, by dead
men.

"Yours ever,

"A. T."

Henley laid this note down and turned cold all over. It was the
concluding sentence which had struck a chill through his heart. He took
the key in his hand, went down to Trenchard's room, unlocked the drawer
in his writing-table, and took out the manuscript. What did Andrew mean
by that sinister sentence? A tale completed by a dead man! Henley sat
down by the fire with the manuscript in his hands and began to read. He
was called away to dinner; but immediately afterward he returned to
his task, and till late into the night his glance travelled down the
closely-written sheets one after the other, until the light from the
candles grew blurred and indistinct, and his eyes ached. But still he
read on. The power and gloom of Andrew's narrative held him in a vice,
and then he was searching for a clue in the labyrinth of words. At last
he came to the final paragraph, and then to the final sentence:

"But at length he laid his hand upon the door that divided him from
Fate."

Henley put the sheet down carefully upon the table. It was three o'clock
in the morning, and the room seemed full of a strange, breathless cold,
the peculiar chilliness that precedes the dawn. The fire was burning
brightly enough, yet the warmth it emitted scarcely seemed to combat the
frosty air that penetrated from without, and Henley shivered as he
rose from his seat. His brows were drawn together, and he was thinking
deeply. A light seemed slowly struggling into his soul. That last
sentence of Tren-chard's connected itself with what he had seen in the
afternoon on the Chelsea Embankment. "He laid his hand upon the door
that divided him from Fate."

A strange idea dawned in Henley's mind, an idea which made many things
clear to him. Yet he put it away, and sat down again to read the
unfinished book once more. Andrew had carried on the story of the man's
growing hatred of the woman whom he had tried to rescue, until it had
developed into a deadly fury, threatening immediate action. Then he had
left the _denouement_ in Henley's hands. He had left it ostensibly
in Henley's hands, but the latter, reading the manuscript again with
intense care, saw that matters had been so contrived that the knot of
the novel could only be cut by murder. As it had been written,