nations. He sprang across
the room, switched on the electric light, and in its white glare I saw
him, his eyes gleaming with anger, his face twisted with passion, as
the hapless charwoman may have seen him weeks before.

"Mr. Colmore!" he cried. "You here! What is the meaning of this, sir?"

With halting words I explained it all, my neuralgia, the narcotic, my
luckless sleep and singular awakening. As he listened the glow of
anger faded from his face, and the sad, impassive mask closed once more
over his features.

"My secret is yours, Mr. Colmore," said he. "I have only myself to
blame for relaxing my precautions. Half confidences are worse than no
confidences, and so you may know all since you know so much. The story
may go where you will when I have passed away, but until then I rely
upon your sense of honour that no human soul shall hear it from your
lips. I am proud still--God help me!--or, at least, I am proud enough
to resent that pity which this story would draw upon me. I have smiled
at envy, and disregarded hatred, but pity is more than I can tolerate.

"You have heard the source from which the voice comes--that voice which
has, as I understand, excited so much curiosity in my household. I am
aware of the rumours to which it has given rise. These speculations,
whether scandalous or superstitious, are such as I can disregard and
forgive. What I should never forgive would be a disloyal spying and
eavesdropping in order to satisfy an illicit curiosity. But of that,
Mr. Colmore, I acquit you.

"When I was a young man, sir, many years younger than you are now, I
was launched upon town without a friend or adviser, and with a purse
which brought only too many false friends and false advisers to my
side. I drank deeply of the wine of life--if there is a man living who
has drunk more deeply he is not a man whom I envy. My purse suffered,
my character suffered, my constitution suffered, stimulants became a
necessity to me, I was a creature from whom my memory recoils. And it
was at that time, the time of my blackest degradation, that God sent
into my life the gentlest, sweetest spirit that ever descended as a
ministering angel from above. She loved me, broken as I was, loved me,
and spent her life in making a man once more of that which had degraded
itself to the level of the beasts.

"But a fell disease struck her, and she withered away before my eyes.
In the hour of her agony it was never of hers