his embraces, and to make him immortal with a kiss.
All the same, he could look on that fine second's immortality with a
cold indifference when the thrill was over. Granted the very lowest
scale for passion, could the thing be real? Could he, for example, have
stayed the torrent of his own blood in full course? He laughed to think
of it, and a line and a half of his favourite poet sang in his brain:

'And thy passions matched with mine Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and
as water unto wine.'

On the whole he began to conceive that he had done rightly, and in that
half-belief, which drew slowly towards conviction, he went to bed and
slept in a stolidity which surprised him later. The fact was that he was
less resolved than tired.

Whilst he was at his deepest sleep a thundering summons at his door
aroused him. A dream which came between the first prelude to this
orchestral drumming and his awaking had advised him of a fainter
disturbance, but by the time he was fairly awake the knocking had grown
so exigent that it bade fair to raise the house.

'Come in I' he cried, and suddenly remembering that he had locked the
door before getting into bed, he scrambled out in the darkness and
turned back the key. 'What the devil is the matter here?' he asked, and
the night porter of the hotel handed him a letter.

'I was told, sir,'he said, in indifferent French, 'to deliver this at
once, but the messenger is gone, and there is no answer called for.'

There was light enough in the corridor to read by, and Paul recognised
Gertrude's superscription.

'Thank you,' he answered. 'Light the gas for me in my room, and that
will do.'

The man obeyed, bowed himself out, and went his way, closing the door
behind him.

The letter Paul held in his hand was bulky, and when he had broken
the envelope open he found that it held no fewer than seven sheets of
Gertrude's crested paper. They were all covered in a hasty and sprawling
hand, and on the first page was a scrawled date and a 'Sir' which had
been written with so much energy that the upward sweeping course of the
pen had bespattered the whole white surface with inky dots of greater or
less magnitude.

'I had thought you my friend,' the epistle began; 'you have professed
to be something more, and, as 'have heard you say, the greater should
include the less.'

There the writing suddenly changed in character, and the letter went on,
as it were, in calmer and more measured cali-grap