I

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Then begin at the end.”

The advice that Ten Eyck Jones gave Philip Rochester was entirely professional. Rochester was a man of what is snobbishly known as position. So was Jones, but his position was that of “bestseller.” Hence the professional quality of the advice. In life, as in letters, there is nothing like getting to the point.

Rochester, indicating a chair, dropped into another.

The chair that he indicated stood next to a table, which, heaped with costly futilities, had a cover that extended to the floor. The room itself⁠—large, wide, furnished gravely with infinite taste, and lighted by two shaded lamps⁠—was somber and, at the moment, soundless. The windows, high and draped, gave on one of the quietest streets in the metropolitan bedlam.

Jones, seating himself, got out a cigarette-case and looked about for a match, wondering, as he did so, what was up.

Fifteen minutes earlier, as he was rising from dinner at his club, Rochester had telephoned, begging him to come at once; and it was in response to that hurry call from a man whose college pal he had been that the novelist was then with the millionaire. That something was wrong with his friend Jones had already noted, though the shaded lamps did not reveal the fact that Rochester’s face was ashen.

“You tell me to begin at the end,” Rochester resumed. “I will. Nina is dead.”

Jones sat back. In the surprise of the announcement his cigarette-case slipped from him.

Nina was⁠—or now, more exactly, had been⁠—Rochester’s wife. Only the day before Jones had seen her on Fifth Avenue; yet, as always, in seeing her, he omitted to admire. She was amazingly pretty, but behind her cameo features he had divined the shrew.

Rochester half raised a hand, glanced at it, let it fall. Still under thirty, he had an ascetic face and dense, black hair. As usual with him, he was dressed in a threadbare fashion which, for a man of large means, is eminently correct.

Jones’s appearance was less fastidious. Though a novelist, he did not look it. He looked like a man of the world to whom much is absurd and nothing important. None the less, the surprise of the announcement shook him a little. In an effort to rally, he leaned over, groped for his cigarette-case, and, not finding it, straightened.

Rochester, whom the mummery perhaps perplexed, motioned.

“It was in this room, shortly before dinner. She had just entered the house. I was standing where you are seated. She came in, looked at me, gasped, half circled, crumpled. I sent for a physician⁠—not hers, for the life of me I could not remember his name⁠—but for anyone. In relatively no time an imbecile named Folsom appeared. He said it might be her heart.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Jones, who, however indifferent to the lady, was a human being and found but that.

“But,” Rochester continued, “Folsom said that as he had not previously attended her he would have to notify the authorities. That is why I telephoned. I suppose the coroner may be here at any moment.”

Jones sat up.

“Phil, you have my deepest sympathy. If there were words of consolation, I would express them. There are none.”

As Jones spoke, he considered the picture⁠—Nina Rochester strolling in and falling dead. It was as extraordinary as his own fiction, which, however, is not saying much.

“But,” he added, “don’t you see, there will have to be a postmortem?”

Bleakly Rochester nodded.

“That is why I asked you to come. I may need bail.”

Jones blinked. Bail! Was there anything behind all this, he wondered?

“Let me ask you,” he said, “did Mrs. Rochester complain at all?”

“Of her heart?” Rochester “Oh, constantly.”

As he spoke, he stood up and turned a switch. Abruptly the somber room was brilliant, and Jones saw that his friend had gone dead-white.

But the answer satisfied him. He was about to say as much when a servant appeared announcing the coroner and the coroner’s physician. Presently the two entered, one thin and vicious as a snake, the other fat, with a fabulous nose.

“Mr. Rochester?” the thin man began, addressing Jones. He waved at his companion. “Dr. Mordecai.”

The novelist got up.

“My name is Ten Eyck Jones.”

“The writer?” the coroner threw out. “I have been reading one of your stories.”

“You must have been very idle,” Jones negligently replied. Indicating his friend, he added: “This is Mr. Rochester.”

Already, and with but a glance, the coroner had taken the latter in. Already, the house, the appointments, the relaxing atmosphere of wealth had impressed him. Usually in a case that promised to be sensational⁠—and this case certainly was promising⁠—hot and heavy he went at it; but at the moment the ambient influences restrained. There was time enough, he thought, and he patted his chin.

“Dr. Folsom reports⁠—”

“Quite so,” Rochester interrupted. “When he was here, I was too overcome to be entirely coherent. It is very natural that he should have reported a death to which Dr. Barker, my wife’s physician, whose name at the time I could not get, would have certified readily. Dr. Barker knew that Mrs. Rochester’s heart was weak. He had warned her about it. None the less, latterly she had been working practically night and day for a relief fund. It was too much for her. She overdid it. Probably you have charities of your own, Mr. Coroner. In that case, and in her name, I shall be glad to give you a thousand dollars for them.”

Instantly, but in French, Jones intervened.

“Don’t be a fool!”

The coroner’s eyes had narrowed.

“Is that a bribe, sir?”

Quite as quickly Rochester took it up.

“You probably think that I don’t want an autopsy; and if so, you are right. I would like to spare the feelings of my dead wife’s family as much as possible. At the same time, if you have so much as the shadow of the peradventure of a doubt, then, if only for my own sake, I must insist on a postmortem.”

The coroner, swallowing something that did not taste like a thousand dollars, shifted.

“Let me see the body,” he said.

“This way,” Rochester replied.

II

The next moment Jones was alone. Professionally, if metaphorically, he cocked an eye. There was something queer here, something behind the scenes. What was it?

For a year and a day he had seen little of Rochester, who, for a while, had been visiting in Massachusetts. From there he had written to Jones, among other things, about a Puritan girl whom he said he was to marry. Subsequently he had shown up in town, but as one does when one has been hit, hard hit, hit on the head. He had become moody, remote, inaccessible.

Afterward, without further allusion to the Puritan maiden, Rochester’s marriage to Nina Varian had occurred. Whether it had been a success, no one save himself and his bride could have told; and now her heart had interfered. Suddenly it had stopped, and, discarding her flesh like a raiment, she had gone⁠—in a jiffy, like that!

It was certainly odd, Jones reflected, and the oddity of it was heightened by Rochester’s demeanor, in which there was no sign of grief, or of anything, except perhaps of funk⁠—the funk of a man too trained to betray it. Only in his curious pallor and in his equally curious bribe had it been revealed.

In an effort to clarify the situation Jones once more felt for his cigarette-case. Remembering that it had slipped from him, he bent over and groped behind the table-cover that reached nearly to the floor.

But now he had it⁠—or no, he had something else. He drew it out and found himself looking at a six-shooter, which among the costly futilities of the room was incongruous as a pike in a tank of goldfish. Unsummoned, an empty remark of Rochester’s returned to him, charged now with significance:

“I was standing where you are seated.”

Strangling an oath, he threw the pistol back under the table, and, fumbling again, discovered the case. Then, straightening, he opened the case, took a cigarette, and was looking for a match when the three men reappeared.

“You tell me this lady was interested in some charity?” the coroner was saying.

Rochester nodded.

“Yes, and that reminds me⁠—”

He pressed a button, sat down at the table opposite Jones, got a checkbook from a drawer, and began to write.

“I have made it to bearer,” he added as he finished, and handed it over.

Greasily the fat physician coughed and rubbed his fabulous nose; but the coroner, folding the paper, said:

“I will have a word with Barker, and then I will authorize Folsom to certify accordingly.”

At the door, in answer to the pressed button, a servant stood.

“Show these gentlemen out,” Rochester said.

“Well?” Jones put in when they had gone.

Rochester stood up, crossed the room, recrossed it, closed the door.

“Well, that’s over!”

With quick sympathy Jones eyed him.

“It must be a relief.”

Rochester mopped his face.

“Yes, for her family it will be. I am glad to have spared them that. They are very decent people. Besides, what I said was the absolute truth, though I did not tell all of it.”

Jones twisted.

“So I rather supposed. Do you care to tell me?”

With an intake of the breath, Rochester sketched a gesture.

“Yes, but beforehand tell me something. Do you think murder is ever justified?”

The sudden query was like the point of a rapier, and Jones backed from before it. Yet immediately, and in spite, too, of the six-shooter on the floor, he felt that whatever else may have happened, the possibility which the question evoked was absurd. Even Bluebeards no longer slaughter their wives. They perhaps find it simpler to love them.

That view⁠—the optimism of which he later revised⁠—steadied him. Lightly he was about to reply that he had killed any number of people in cold ink; but, judging the lightness ill-timed, instead he asked for a match.

Before Rochester could supply him, the servant entered.

“Mrs. Varian, sir.”

Rochester turned to Jones.

“That’s her mother, poor soul!”

Jones, at once on his feet, stretched a hand.

“I’ll look in again, Phil.”

He was as good as his word. On the morrow he returned to the house, and again the day after, but fruitlessly. Rochester was invisible. “He is suffering from aftershock,” Jones concluded, and, apart from attending the funeral and sending the usual flowers, he desisted from further effort.

Later a note came, thanking him, saying that Rochester was leaving town, and Jones wondered if he were en route for Massachusetts and the Puritan girl; but that amourette, he decided, had clearly been ended. Even otherwise, Rochester was too recently a widower to renew it.

Yet what was behind that widowerhood Jones could not picture. All that he could see was the pistol.

III

It was then October. June had come and was going before Jones saw Rochester again.

It was in his own workshop⁠—a room containing no other evidence of the life known as literary except a vast table, upon which was a thin sheaf of copy. Upon the manuscript was a stiletto, long, wicked, brilliant, which, one adventurous night in Madrid, he had found⁠—in his back. Long since he had recovered from its quick acquisition. Now he used it as a paperweight.

It was otherwise serviceable. It inspired. Engraved on the glittering blade was a promise⁠—“Penetrabo.”

“I have been away,” Rochester very needlessly explained, after Jones had greeted him. “I have been to Caracas, to Rio, to Montevideo. I have been trying to get away from myself. The task is not humanly possible. I failed.”

Amicably Jones looked him over. He was less abominably dressed than before, and tan had covered the pallor of his face. Otherwise, too, he had changed, and not unbecomingly. His hair, formerly blue-black, had an eighteenth-century powdered effect. It was white.

“I’ll have a cigar, if you’ve got one,” resumed Rochester, seating himself. “And something else,” he added as Jones shoved a box at him.

“Anything you wish, Phil.”

Rochester, lighting a cigar, considered him.

“I want you to do what only a novelist can. I want you to double your personality, to put yourself in my place and tell me how, given the circumstances, you would have me act if I were a character in one of your stories.” Rochester paused and flicked his ashes. “God knows I have tried to find the way,” he continued; “but I cannot. Fate is against me!”

“Fate has nothing against any of us, Phil, except, indeed, such things as we may have against ourselves.”

Rochester shook himself. The idea was too massive for immediate digestion. Divining which, Jones, with ready sympathy, tacked.

“Tell me what is troubling you. It began in Massachusetts, did it not?”

At the clairvoyance of that, Rochester stared; but at once memory raised a latch.

“Yes, I wrote you from there. That was before my marriage. I had met somebody. I wrote you of it; but did I tell you her name? It was Priscilla. It does not picture her. No name could, except perhaps some one of those names that Poe gave to his heroines. She seemed a-tiptoe on the threshold of the beyond. When I first saw her, I thanked her. She asked me why. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you have shown me an angel.’ ”

“I must use that!” Jones professionally reflected.

“Do you remember Euphorion?” Rochester immediately asked. “That Greek who, in Periclean days, painted only the mouth? He alone could have portrayed hers. It was ideal. So, too, were her eyes. In the lumber-room of verse is a line that runs: ‘Beauty, like a murmuring sound, had passed into her face.’ That line seemed made for her. It accompanied and announced her. I can hear it now, as I can hear her voice. The echo of both used to haunt me. There were days without number and nights without end when I thought the echo would drive me mad. On one occasion it did; but that was long afterward.”

Rochester puffed, but vainly. Relighting the cigar, he resumed:

“At the time she represented the goal in that eternal steeplechase after happiness in which, shirted and capped in the colors of hope, we all take part. Does it not seem to you that few of us ever get there? We either fall by the way or miss it by a nose. It was my misfortune to be thrown at the last hurdle. A furlong more, and the cup was mine⁠—or at least I thought so; but I was jockeyed out of it.” Suddenly shifting, he as suddenly asked: “Do you think murder is ever justified?”

“You put that question before, Phil,” Jones answered.

“Again and again I have put it. But, tell me, do you?”

Professionally, if pontifically, Jones took it up.

“The theory of crime is human and relatively modern. Formerly people did as they liked. Subsequently they devised rules for their own behavior. Those who broke the rules were treated as malefactors. The theory of crime is therefore human. As for murder, while usual and legitimate in Neozoic times, today it properly belongs to the domain of mental pathology.”

With deepening gloom Rochester considered it. Then, and rather fiercely, he threw out:

“If you were wholly in love with a girl who was equally in love with you, and you were jockeyed out of it, how would you feel? How would you act? Would you be content to analyze the situation from the standpoint of history and therapeutics?”

Jones glanced at the stiletto.

“Few of us can tell in advance how we should act in any emergency. We may think we know, but that is because we don’t realize that we are apt to change our ideas about everything⁠—except the high opinion which we have of ourselves.”

Rochester, entangled at once in the coils of that aphorism, resigned himself to it.

“Well, in any event, it was haphazard, in a village street, that I met her, and it was Nina who introduced me. The circumstances were such that Nina could not very well do otherwise, but she effected it as if saying:

“ ‘Here, off with your hat, and trot along with you!’

“Nina and I were both visiting at the same house. At the moment we were going on to luncheon at another house, and I thought she was just in a hurry⁠—which she usually was. Then she marched me off. Meanwhile, after thanking Priscilla⁠—a proceeding which Nina characterized as being in very poor taste⁠—I could not but remark the contrast between them. You would have said that they came of alien races, from different zones. Priscilla Mather, with her Puritan face, suggested a church; Nina Varian, with her Fifth Avenue atmosphere, resembled a bazaar. One was all soul, the other all life.”

One was a lily, the other an orchid, thought Jones, who cared no more for orchids than he had for the late Mrs. Rochester.

“Well?” he proddingly threw out.

“Well, there you have the cast of the drama⁠—myself and these two girls. They were the leads. For minor characters throw in a deacon and a plumber.”

“A plumber!” Jones exclaimed.

“Well, why not? Everybody can’t be a bestseller.”

“The Lord forbid!” Jones fervently protested, while mentally foreseeing that in this moving picture the plumber was of course the villain.

“The deacon,” Rochester resumed, “was Priscilla’s father, a thin-lipped psalm-singer in a duster. The plumber⁠—but I will get to him presently. It was from Nina that I learned of him; but not until later. At the time I knew nothing except that I was young, that Priscilla was young, that we were both in the festival of life, and of a life filled to the brim with hosannas. Throughout the green afternoons and sudden dusks that I passed with her I had that sense of exhilaration which no grape has ever produced, and of which only those in love with love are conscious. To employ a homely expression, I felt as if I could jump out of my skin. Perhaps I was a little insane, as a healthy and happy child will sometimes become. I can remember that I would laugh for no reason, and yet what better reason could there be? But the laughter ceased, the exhilaration passed, the hosannas died in my throat. I had thought paradise so neighborly. The bitterest lesson of life is that always it lies just beyond!”

Rochester paused, opened and closed a hand.

“Between us no word had been said. It was her eyes that spoke. Mine had asked and hers had answered. No word had been said, yet our hearts had met. That is the ideal. Ours was the rapture of kisses without the contact of lips. We knew, and that knowledge transcended speech. We knew, and that knowledge exceeded bliss. In silence and the communion of spirit divinely we were betrothed⁠—or at least I thought so. It was then, when happiness had reached its apogee, that, precisely as the lightning strikes and rescales the sky, it was then that happiness blinded and vanished.”

IV

At this point Jones lost the thread for a moment. He was thinking of the eternal story, told first perhaps in Babylon and retold ever since⁠—the story of lovers irreparably parted at the beginning and inevitably united at the end. It is a famous story. However old, it is always new, and Jones wondered if he could not retell it, with Priscilla and Rochester⁠—under other names⁠—for leads.

Yet the manifest bribe to the coroner, and the antecedent object on the floor⁠—these things blocked him. In considering them he must have missed something, for when he caught up with Rochester again the latter was telling of Boston, where he had gone for a ring, and where he had run into Nina.

“When she told me,” he was saying, “I experienced the curious and by no means enviable sensation of falling from an inordinate height. I had a sense of struggle with the intangible, in which my brain seemed to tip.”

“When she told you what?” inquired Jones, getting back at it.

“About Priscilla. It appeared that for a year she had been secretly married. Nina had stood up with her, and she told me of it⁠—only, as she assured me, and as I realized, for my good. Yes, I realized that; but the goodness of it was that of the surgeon’s knife. God, how it hurt!”

“And what,” Jones asked, “did you say to the young woman when you saw her again?”

“I did not see her again⁠—at least, not for a long time. I couldn’t see her. Yet I did, and constantly. She haunted me.”

Jones nodded.

“I can understand that. But why was she so⁠—er⁠—well, clandestine?”

“Because of her father, who would not hear of the plumber.”

“Oho!” Jones exclaimed. “It was the plumber, was it, whom she married?”

“Well, you see, from the way Nina put it, he was not an ordinary plumber; he was what you might call a wholesaler. It is true that⁠—”

“At the same time,” Jones interrupted, “the fact could hardly console you.”

“What could? I tried to forget⁠—not to remember, rather⁠—but with grief no one can argue. To banish it there is nothing but time and silence.”

“And someone else,” Jones maliciously cut in.

Rochester, exhaling smoke, looked through it at him.

“As you say. Nina became my wife. As such, and more particularly since she is no longer here, I cannot decently say anything against her. But that you may understand the situation, I can, and without discredit to her, admit that she suffered from an affliction which, probably congenital, was therefore not in the least her fault. She simply could not help it.”

“You are referring to her heart?”

“Well, yes, her heart. Now in that novel of yours⁠—In Silk and Scarlet, isn’t it⁠—how was it that you defined jealousy?”

“Jealousy!” Jones blankly repeated. “I am sure I don’t know; but wait a second. ‘The barometer of the affections’⁠—was that it?”

“No. You called it inflammation of the mind, and that, poor woman, is precisely what she had. Nothing whatever, a chance remark, a momentary delay, the call of the telephone, anything, no matter what, was ground for suspicions which, believe me, were unfathomable. To argue with her was as profitable as talking at a phonograph. Once wound up, nothing could stop her.”

Except a bullet, Jones with sudden insight reflected.

“It is possible,” Rochester continued, “that she cared for me; but it is the misfortune of the jealous that they must love as though they hated, and the quintessence of it all she distilled into scenes that made life so unendurable that I took to going out. Where? Anywhere. Wherever I knew she would not be. And then, one day, I saw her.”

Appreciatively Jones gestured.

“From what you have told me, it was inevitable that Mrs. Rochester should have followed you.”

“I am not speaking of her. It was Priscilla that I saw.”

“And the plumber?”

“No; she was alone. It was on Fifth Avenue.”

“But you asked after him?”

“Yes, I did. I approached, raised my hat, and said: ‘It is so long since I have seen you. I hope you are well. And how is your husband?’⁠—words simple enough, as you will admit, but before them she backed and wilted. Actually I could see circles forming under her eyes. Shall I ever forget the look in them? It was the imploring look of a terrorized child. With that look she shrank from me and gasped: My husband?’

“I hastened to reassure her. ‘Forgive me,’ I said, ‘I know it is a secret; but it is one I have never mentioned, one which I never thought I should mention, one which I never thought could be.’

“ ‘My husband?’ she tremblingly repeated.

“ ‘I learned of it the day after I last saw you,’ I continued. ‘Pray do not be alarmed. It was Mrs. Rochester who told me. She has not told anyone else, nor shall I.’

“With a gesture infinitely pathetic she half raised a hand. ‘But I have no husband!’

“In view of what had gone before, that seemed a bit needless, and I took it up. ‘You have perhaps forgotten that my wife was your bridesmaid. She told me in confidence that you married a’⁠—plumber, I was about to say, but somehow it seemed incongruous, and for it I substituted⁠—‘a man to whom your father objected.’

“I had spoken very gently, but at each word she winced. It was as if I were striking her. Meanwhile her underlip had been quivering. I could see her bite it. She closed her eyes and threw her head back. I thought she was going to faint. As I realized afterward, she was reabsorbing her tears. But in a moment she looked at me, tried to speak, yet visibly she could not. Instead, she gave me a hand, and with the other she motioned at a taxi. She moved toward it and got in. I would have followed, but she closed the door, lifted her two hands, and, her lip still quivering, murmured:

“ ‘May God forgive her, Philip! It is all untrue. I had intended to be yours.’

“ ‘Where to, lady?’ the chauffeur asked.

“She must have replied, for she sank back, the motor veered, it was off, and I was alone in the crowd.”

Rather dramatic, Jones professionally reflected.

Rochester motioned.

“When people go mad, they are said to see red. Perhaps they do. What I saw was divorce. I saw, too, how it could be hastened; for I saw something else⁠—a pistol, which I knew would be compelling, and which was then at the house. I hurried home. Nina was not there. I got the pistol and waited. Finally I heard her at the door, heard the servant open it, heard her step as she entered the room where I stood.

“How I looked, pistol in hand, I cannot say; but at sight of it and of me she stopped, her eyes widened, her mouth parted, she was going to scream. She must have seen that I knew. Then at once I came out with it.

“ ‘You lied to me! You told me Priscilla was married. You invented it to get me for yourself. Take that!’

“With the ridiculous noise of a firecracker, the pistol went off. Point-blank I had fired. She half circled and tumbled over on her face. I threw the pistol under the table and rang. When the servant came I sent for a physician. You know the rest.”

Jones, who had been surveying the ceiling, looked down. Before him, on the table, was the knife with the promise⁠—“Penetrabo.” But beneath the surface of this drama he could not penetrate. The tale of it startled him into a belief in miracles. Only a procession of them could have preserved Rochester from the chair, and what deepened the marvel was the connivance of the physicians, whose examinations, however perfunctory, must have disclosed the truth.

For a moment he eyed the knife, then the assassin.

“I must say that you handled the coroner very adroitly! That relief-fund story which you advanced was, I take it, entirely imaginary. Even so, unless you bribed Folsom also⁠—”

“I bribed no one,” Rochester protested. “Why should I? I did not want an autopsy. Who would? When Nina fell, I thought she had fainted. I had no idea she was dead. Do you suppose I had any intention of killing her? I hadn’t the slightest. All I wanted was to alarm her into leaving me and getting a divorce.”

“You certainly got one⁠—with a bullet. That is very primitive, Phil!”

At that Rochester started. He stared at the novelist, who, knife in hand, looked rather primitive himself. Relentlessly the latter continued:

“It would call it Neozoic, only there were no firearms then.”

“But⁠—” began Rochester, staring still, and broke off.

“But what?”

Impotently Rochester gestured.

“Why, nothing⁠—nothing whatever; only I seem to have dropped a thread.”

“A thread!” Jones threw at him. “Is that the way you refer to your wife? It is true I never admired her, but then⁠—”

“Look here!” Rochester protested. “You are all at sea. In telling you that I fired point-blank, I seem to have omitted to dot the i’s. It was a blank cartridge that I fired. In a brief summary such as I have given, one can’t think of every detail. Besides, I thought you already had it. It is no palliation, I admit, yet⁠—”

Jones had been twisting the knife. Now the device on it prompted.

“You mean that she died of fright?”

“Certainly I do.”

V

In sheer relief, Jones sat back.

“But,” Rochester resumed, “none the less, I killed her.”

Aridly, across the novelist’s face there passed a smile.

“Though I am not imaginative enough to believe in fate, I am sufficiently commonplace to believe in an evil conscience. It was that that killed her.”

Rochester shook his head.

“No, it was I.”

Jones, knife in hand, turned on his friend.

“You are ridiculous, that’s what you are. The essence of crime is the intent, and in the absence of intention, though you were tried for it, as you might have been, you would be acquitted. But I appreciate now as I never did before the attitude of the physicians and the coroner. Knowing nothing of your pistol and less of her conscience, finding no evidence of violence, and having no reason to suspect anything else, they swallowed what you told them. It was adroit and, in view of the circumstances, excusable. On the other hand, if you had made a soiled breast of it, while you might have needed bail, not for a moment would you have been in jeopardy.”

“You’re a novelist!” retorted Rochester, who perhaps knew better⁠—or worse.

Jones glanced at the knife.

“Now what are you to do? You tell me that you have been trying to get away from yourself and failed.”

Rochester, suffocating a sigh, took it up.

“Remorse prevented me.”

“Remorse?” Jones angrily repeated. “Rubbish! You failed because you thought of nothing but your precious self. To get away from it, you’ve got to think not of yourself, but of others. As for your remorse, it is medieval. Penitents used to expiate it in prayer. The most commendable form of prayer is a good deed. By the same token, the most important word in the dictionary is ‘duty.’ You have one to perform⁠—don’t you realize it?”

Uncertainly Rochester nodded.

“I had thought of the front.”

“The front! What earthly use could you be in that red galley?”

“I had thought, too, of joining the Trappists.”

“The Trappists! When you can have the world for monastery!”

Uneasily, in the spaciousness of that, Rochester squirmed.

“No!” Jones cried at him. “You have another duty. Have you forgotten Priscilla?”

“Forgotten her! Did Dante in his inferno forget Beatrice?”

“Don’t run into excesses,” retorted Jones, to whom the bard was sacred. “There has been but one Dante, and, except in the heaven of the cantos, no Beatrice; but Priscilla exists, and on earth⁠—and the plumber does not. Go to her! There is your duty.”

The vista allured, yet before the witchery of it Rochester lowered his eyes.

“To do that, I would have to tell her, and⁠—but you don’t know her⁠—never could she forgive!”

Angrily Jones again turned on him.

“No, I don’t know her, but I would not be worth my syndicate if I did not know women, and you can take it from me that in the heart of a woman who loves always there is forgiveness. Always, do you hear me?”

“Yes,” Rochester moodily answered. “I hear you, but I doubt it.”

“I dare say; but that is because you have yet to learn that all love is pity.”

“If I could think that!” Rochester, with lifted eyes, exclaimed. “If I could think⁠—”

Jones, brandishing the knife, cut him short.

“Don’t think⁠—act! Action is thought in motion. You have asked me what, in your circumstances, I would have a character in fiction do. Ordinarily it would cost you one fifty to discover. Here it is, free⁠—I would have him stride, booted and spurred, into the palace of all delights, the palace of adventure, of love and ambition, and if ever, in the high halls there, a fantom surged, I would have him exorcise the apparition, not with vain regrets, but with the joy of giving. You are not a pauper, Phil. If you think you have done evil, then efface it with good. Meanwhile⁠—”

The knife clattered on the table. Jones stood up.

“Meanwhile there is that hurdle-race. Your description of it might have been worse. In any event it is too good for you, and I will annex it for copy purposes. But the race remains. You now know the course better than before. Go it again. Dress yourself once more in the colors of hope. Put on anew its magic shirt and cap. Off with you! Take the hurdles as if there were nothing there, and at the goal, if you win the cup, don’t thank fortune⁠—there is no such thing⁠—or your stars, for you have none. Thank Priscilla⁠—it is hers to withhold or to bestow.”

Rochester, who during the tirade had listened as a prisoner at the bar listens to his attorney, flushed beneath his tan.

“By the Lord, you’re right! I will go to her. I’ll tell her all. It will be for her to condemn or acquit.”

Jones smiled.

“And when she decides the case, you might wire me.”

A week later the wire came. Lacedaemonian in brevity, apart from the address and the signature, it contained just four words:

Join me. Wedding tomorrow.

“Well,” Jones professionally reflected, as he told his servant to pack, “some day I’ll make a novel out of it all, and I’ll call it⁠—let me see⁠—oh, yes, I’ll call it The Verdict.”