ore regret her treatment of him.
The thing that she must realise before everything else was his
magnanimity. His magnanimity! Yes! he had loved her with amazing
greatness of heart. He had not seen it so clearly before--but of course
he was going to leave her all his property. He saw it instantly, as a
thing determined and inevitable. She would think how good he was, how
spaciously generous; surrounded by all that makes life tolerable from
his hand, she would recall with infinite regret her scorn and coldness.
And when she sought expression for that regret, she would find that
occasion gone forever, she should be met by a locked door, by a
disdainful stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his eyes and
remained for a space imagining himself that white dead face.

From that he passed to other aspects of the matter, but his
determination was assured. He meditated elaborately before he took
action, for the drug he had taken inclined him to a lethargic and
dignified melancholy. In certain respects he modified details. If he
left all his property to Elizabeth it would include the voluptuously
appointed room he occupied, and for many reasons he did not care to
leave that to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to some one. In
his clogged condition this worried him extremely.

In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic exponent of the
fashionable religious cult, whose conversation had been so pleasing in
the past. "_He_ will understand," said Bindon with a sentimental sigh.
"He knows what Evil means--he understands something of the Stupendous
Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes--he will understand." By that
phrase it was that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy and
undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and
an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space thinking how
very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had
been. Even now--might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo
down the ages, sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot
Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoilt three phonographic
coils, got a headache, took a second dose to calm himself, and reverted
to magnanimity and his former design.

At last he faced the unpalatable problem of Denton. It needed all his
newborn magnanimity before he could swallow the thought of Denton; but
at last this greatly misunderstood man, assisted by his sedative and