that such
would have made his wife a happy woman and him a contented man? To
live, to know of that degraded thing, for whose existence he was
responsible, being there at the convict station amongst the other human
animals, and becoming lower and more degraded every day. To look
forward through two long years of misery and apprehension to the return
of--his son. His son--a strange yearning towards the vicious creature
he had carelessly glanced at that morning, took possession of him. He
started up again, and seized his hat. He would go down, even though it
were nearly midnight, and get the gaoler to admit him to the prisoner's
cell. He made a few steps towards the door, and then stopped. No,
better not. Reality would blast the delicate glamour-bloom with which
his imagination had clothed for the moment that sordid form. It was the
beauty of the eyes that haunted him. He knew that these imaginings were
false. In another moment they were gone. What--after two years to meet
that horrible cringing creature with the angel's eyes, in the street,
and know him as his son--his son that he had asked God for in the days
when he used to pray. Better a hundred deaths.

Suicide. Why not? Suicide was said to be disgraceful. Why? Other
nations, more civilised in some respects than ours, had held it to be
honourable. Not if one has responsibilities. His wife--well--he
shrewdly suspected that she would be glad of her freedom. He had no
child----Oh, God! Yes he had.

Disgrace to his wife and to his other relations. Ah! here came in the
beauty of his plan. Suicide would never be suspected.

Kellson went into the bedroom and opened his portmanteau. From the
pocket of the partition he took a little bottle of chloral hydrate, a
drug which he was in the habit of using when insomnia pressed heavily
upon him, as it periodically did. The chloral was in five-grain
tabloids. His usual dose was three tabloids or fifteen grains. He now
counted twenty tabloids into a tumbler, which he half filled with
water.

The front door was still open, and Kellson, remembering this, went to
shut it. The moon had now soared high above the mountain, and a
spectacle, wonderfully and wildly beautiful, was revealed. Kellson
walked into the garden and gazed on it. The mist, no longer smooth and
clinging, but drawn and curled into fantastic wreaths, was rising
slowly into the windless sky. The tired-out man took one lingering
look, and then walked quickly into the