in both hands, and gazed, as though performing some religious rite, into the cavities of the empty eye-sockets. Then stiffly, letting his hands sink, he rested it upon his knees.

"Pardon me," he said, looking full at Laurence, while a shadow, rather than a flush, seemed to pass over his attenuated face. "I was tempted to act unworthily.—I agreed to answer such questions as you might put to me. But perceiving those questions tended to revive a matter which has caused me one of the few humiliations and regrets I have suffered during my life, I shrank. I was tempted weakly to break faith with you and retract my promise."

"Pray, sir, don't take it so seriously," Laurence entreated. "Of course, I should never have approached the subject had I known it was disagreeable to you. It was just the idle curiosity of an idle man. What on earth does it matter?"

"To you very little, presumably, since you are, as you say, idle—your days, that is, filled with a round of amusements deadening—as I fear—to the intellectual and moral conscience. But with me the case is otherwise. The judgment of no human being is of moment to me. But my judgment of myself is of infinite moment."

Mr. Rivers laid one transparent hand upon the dome of the crystal skull, as though for support. His face had grown hard as steel.

"It is therefore incumbent upon me, not in satisfaction of your curiosity, my dear Laurence, but in satisfaction of my own sense of rectitude, that I should accept this opportunity of stating the following facts. I inherited this property—as you will shortly inherit it—from an uncle, a man very much my senior. I had prosecuted my studies abroad, in the learned centres of Germany and France, from an early age. My acquaintance with my uncle was slight. I knew little of his private life. But I had reason to believe him a person of an undisciplined mind, imbued with the extravagant socialistic views current during the French Revolution, unbridled alike in passions of love and of hate. Questions of character have never interested me; I therefore made no further inquiry regarding my predecessor's private life. My own tastes and habits were already fixed. I settled myself here and continued the studies in experimental physics, philology, and metaphysics, in which I had already engaged. I also added to the collection of pictures and objects of art that I found in the house. My life has been blameless, as most men count blame. I can assert, without fear of contradiction, that my moral and intellectual integrity have been complete. Only in one connection have I 

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