wonted strength of the hour, Eben Tollman moved
the other figure until what had been Stuart Farquaharson sat beside what
had been Conscience Tollman in lover-like proximity.

As he staged this ghastly pantomime, he gloated wildly. That was the
scene which a bolted door had prevented him from surprising! That was
the inexpressible and iniquitous devotion which they had hidden in
innocent smiles! Their eyes were closed, but each face was turned
toward the other, and in death the woman's seemed to take on a deeper
tenderness.

Tollman lifted one of her arms, from which the drapery fell back, and
laid it across the shoulder of the man at her side, and about him the
world rocked in the quake of mania.

He stood off and contemplated them from a greater distance--and having,
in his madman's saturnalia, burned out even the augmented forces of his
fever, a feeling of weakness overcame him. Then it was that his eyes
caught the corner of an envelope protruding from the pocket of Stuart
Farquaharson's bath robe. Hurriedly he tore it out and ripped off the
end. It was in Conscience's hand--doubtless another proof of iniquity.

But as he read, the fires of his brain were swept back, under the
quenching force of undeniable conviction. This letter had not been meant
for his eyes. It could hold no motive of deceiving him.

Only treatment in confinement could ever again set up the fallen and
shattered sanity of this man, but like rents in a curtain there came to
him flashes of the rational. They came fitfully under the tremendously
sobering effect of what he read. What Stuart Farquaharson had never
read.

"It was my fault.... I have been absolutely true to him in act ... but
perhaps ... I could ... have been true in a larger sense. I have been
thinking of his great generosity and of what unfaltering trust he has in
me ... he has always been above jealousy. We know that there has been no
taint of guilt. Even now I think I have a fighting chance of winning. If
I have I owe it to you...." These words spelled out a document which
could not be doubted, which even the perversion of a jealousy gone mad
could no longer doubt.

He, Eben Tollman, the righteous, had built the whole horrible structure
of abomination--out of jealous fabrications! He had made the hideous
mistake and capped it with murder!

A nausea of brain and soul swept him. Then again the half-sane interval
darkened luridly into hallucination, but now it was a new hallucin