hout, a curious
stumbling, shuffling sound. She put down the glass, went to the door
that opened into the hall, and looked out and down. One light was still
burning below, and she could see distinctly. A man was clumsily,
heavily, ascending the staircase, holding on to the balustrade. He was
singing to himself, breaking into the maudlin harmony with an
occasional laugh--

"For this is the way we do it on the veld,
When the band begins to play;
With one bottle on the table and one below the belt,
When the band begins to play--"

It was Rudyard, and he was drunk--almost helplessly drunk.

A cry of pain rose to her lips, but her trembling hand stopped it. With
a shudder she turned back to her sitting-room. Throwing herself on the
divan where she had sat with Ian Stafford, she buried her face in her
arms. The hours went by.

CHAPTER XI

IN WALES, WHERE JIGGER PLAYS HIS PART

"Really, the unnecessary violence with which people take their own
lives, or the lives of others, is amazing. They did it better in olden
days in Italy and the East. No waste or anything--all scientifically
measured."

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, bec