guest with a complete absence of pity.

"He's drinking himself drunk on your whisky, and that girl waiting for him upstairs! If you don't think of him, you might of her!"

"True. I'd forgotten his wife," said Gardiner. He drew the decanter over to his side of the table and looked up, ready to break in. Unluckily Trent had caught the last word, and it started him off on a new tack.

"Neither of you young chaps married? Lucky dogs! you've the chances! I knew a little girl in Chatham once--"

Gardiner had kept his friend just a few minutes too long. He had now found his peculiar vein, and he grew eloquent. Denis had a clean life behind him, and a clean mind; Gardiner felt rather than saw him stirring in his chair, and held up a hand to keep him quiet. He himself was less fastidious, but even he did not much like what he had called up. There are things a man may say, and others he may not, and it was these last that Trent said. He was morally rotten. Still, Gardiner did not want a row.

"Funny tale, very," he said when Trent had finished with the little girl at Chatham. "And now, I don't want to hurry you, but isn't it getting rather late? I'm afraid we shall be keeping Mrs. Trent up."

"My wife?" said Trent. He had just come to the table to fill up his glass from the decanter which Gardiner was keeping under his hand. Looking up with a smile, he added another sentence. Simultaneously, Denis sprang to his feet, the blood rushing into his face, and Gardiner caught up the first thing that came to his hand--the chisel that had opened the packing-case--and flung it at the speaker's head.

"Get out, you filthy swine!"

It took him in the middle of his forehead, and knocked him over. He fell without an effort to save himself, flat on the whole length of his back with his head in the fender. There he lay. Denis raised the lamp on high; Gardiner stooped over him--and recoiled.

"Good Lord!" he said, "the man's dead!"

CHAPTER IIA LIE THAT IS HALF A TRUTH   I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.   GENESIS.

Trent lay as he had fallen, with his head on the fender, in a pool of blood which slowly enlarged itself and sopped into the carpet. The sharp edge had fractured his skull. He was stone dead, beyond possibility of doubt, yet 

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