"You're not much better, at all events," observed Adrian wrathfully. "Look here, Trevanna, shut up—I'm not in the best of tempers, and you know I've got hot blood in my veins, so when I get angry it's dangerous. Don't rouse the tiger in me."

"Don't talk bosh," said Trevanna politely, "you know you only want to marry Olive Maunders for her money."

"Speak for yourself," cried Lancaster, going over to a side table and taking up a decanter to pour himself out some brandy. "I know you'd give anything to be in my place."

"Tell you what," said Trevanna, with an ugly look. "I'll play you for her—if I win, I marry her."

"Hold your tongue," retorted Adrian, grasping the stem of the decanter in a paroxysm of rage.

"I'll back this thousand against Olive Maunders," observed Trevanna, ignoring the menacing look of his friend. "Will you play?"

"No."

"Then go to the devil," shouted Philip, losing control of himself and flinging the cards he was holding into the face of Adrian. "Take that."

The hot blood flamed in Lancaster's face, and with a stifled roar of anger he threw the heavy decanter he was holding at Philip Trevanna's head. It struck him full on the temple, and without a word the young man fell like a log on the floor, while the decanter, smashing into a thousand pieces, was scattered over the carpet, and the contents diffused an odour of spirits through the room.

There was a dead silence for one awful moment, broken only by the steady tick of the clock. Suddenly a woman in the street laughed shrilly, and the sound seemed to arouse Adrian out of the lethargy into which he had fallen. A red mist floated before his eyes and his limbs seemed paralysed. Even when he strove to cry out his voice died away in a hoarse whisper, and he stood with a terrible look of anguish on his face staring at the overturned card-table, the broken pieces of glass, and the figure lying at his feet so still and deathlike, with a thin red stream of blood flowing from an ugly wound in the temple.

Once more the woman laughed, and Adrian rapidly sprang to the windows, in a stealthy manner, closed them and pulled down the blinds so as to shut out this terrible sight from the eyes of the prying world.

A sullen roll of thunder startled him, and 

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