other in the face. No solitude could have been as ghastly as that solitude of two people who shared a revolting secret. For I had convinced her that I was guilty. I had succeeded in doing what I had set out to do, and I had ruined two lives in doing it. I have the faculty, it seems, of poisoning whatever I touch. Only today, my wife said to me——"

I started to my feet with a great rush of relief and thankfulness. "Ah, your wife is alive, then?" I cried.

"My wife is alive. That is—my second wife is alive," he said, with a horrible forced smile.

I sank back gasping. "What did you do with your first wife, you dirty hound?" I moaned in helpless indignation.

He closed his eyes, and a wave of bitter triumph played about the muscles of his mouth. "Have I convinced you too, at last?" he said.

Then I realized that I had been an insulting idiot. At worst, the man before me was a pathological case, and he certainly belonged in an asylum rather than in a prison.

"Forgive me, Banaotovich," I panted. "I don't know what made me——"

He looked at me sadly, almost compassionately. "There is nothing to forgive," he said, very quietly. "I am all you called me and a thousand times worse. Now let me finish my story."

"You don't need to," I said hastily. "I know all the rest of it."

All interest, I am afraid nearly all sympathy, had gone out of me. What I wanted most of all was to get away from this melancholy citizen with power and madness in his gray eyes.

"No, you don't know quite all of it yet," he insisted. "Perhaps if I tell you the whole story, even if you can't excuse me—and I don't deserve your excusing, I don't want your excusing—you can understand me a little better, and think of me a little more kindly.

"There was another woman. I couldn't help it, any more than any of us can help anything. A fine, sympathetic young woman, who loved me because she knew I was unhappy. I had been married to the other woman for four years. We were completely estranged. We could scarcely bear to speak to each other. I couldn't be easy one moment in the same house with her. I had a cot in my office out in town because I couldn't even sleep soundly at home. It was hell. The terror in her eyes made me physically sick. My wife learned about the other woman. My wife was 

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