After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very
quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he
had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room
to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.
He has been dead ten hours now. Don't stir, and don't look at me like
that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do
not concern you. What you have to do is this--"

"Stop, Gray. I don't want to know anything further. Whether what you
have told me is true or not true doesn't concern me. I entirely
decline to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to
yourself. They don't interest me any more."

"Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to interest
you. I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can't help myself. You
are the one man who is able to save me. I am forced to bring you into
the matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific. You know
about chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments.
What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--to
destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this
person come into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is
supposed to be in Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is
missed, there must be no trace of him found here. You, Alan, you must
change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes
that I may scatter in the air."

"You are mad, Dorian."

"Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."

"You are mad, I tell you--mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to
help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. I will have nothing
to do with this matter, whatever it is. Do you think I am going to
peril my reputation for you? What is it to me what devil's work you
are up to?"

"It was suicide, Alan."

"I am glad of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy."

"Do you still refuse to do this for me?"

"Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I
don't care what shame comes on you. You deserve it all. I should not
be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. How dare you ask
me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? I should
have thought you knew more about people's characters. Your friend Lord
Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever els