he gold and purple hanging, he flung it right over the
picture.

There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard
Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder if
he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of
each other.

"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.

He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
thrust back into the chair, and that Campbell was gazing into a
glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs he heard the key
being turned in the lock.

It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He was
pale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked me to do," he
muttered. "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again."

"You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that," said Dorian,
simply.

As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at
the table was gone.

CHAPTER XV

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
buttonhole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing
with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he
bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps
one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed
that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our
age. Those finely-shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for
sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He
himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a
moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
was a very clever woman, with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an excellent wife
to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband
properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and
married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted
herself now to the plea