The Sacrificial Alter

LOUIS BAC drifted like a gray shadow through the gray streets of San Francisco. Even the French colony, one of the most homogeneous units of the city, knew little more of him than the community at large. He was the son of one famous restaurateur and the grandson of another; he had been sent to a Lycee in Paris at the age of twelve, graduated from the University of Paris at twenty-two, and returned to San Francisco upon the death of his father a year later. The French colony were surprised that he did not go back to Paris after selling the restaurant–his energetic mother had pre-deceased her husband–but buried himself in the old Bac home behind the eucalyptus-trees on the steepest hillside of the city; otherwise his return and himself attracted no attention whatever until he flung his hat into the international arena.

Both his father, Henri Bac II., and his shrewd mother, Antoinette, had been agreed upon giving their studious ascetic little son a true American’s chance to rise in the world, and, acting on the advice of their chief patron and the leader of the French colony, M. Cesar Dupont, who offered his escort, had sent the boy to the College Louis le Grand. They never saw their only child again; but although Louis had been reticent of speech, he proved a very prodigal with his pen. As the years passed it became evident–the entire French colony read these letters–that his goal was belles-lettres and that he was practising on his family. Finally, after many mutations his style became so formal and precise that M. Dupont became alarmed and, during his next visit to Paris, invited the young man to breakfast.

Louis by this time was eighteen, of medium height, as thin as all overworked, underfed, underoxygenated Lycee boys, with large gray eyes that were rarely raised, a long pale face, a long thin nose, a small thin-lipped mouth. The brow was abnormally large, the rest of the head rather small. It was not an attractive personality, M. Dupont reflected–he had not seen Louis for several years–but the boy carried something uncommon in his head-piece, or he, Cesar Dupont, fashionable merchant and bon viveur, had studied the craniums of a thousand San Francisco geniuses in vain.

He had taken his guest to the Restaurant de la Tour d’Argent, and while the duck’s frame was being crushed he asked, abruptly:

“Have you given a thought to your future career, Louis? Of course you know you will not be obliged to drudge, but to be a professor of French literature is not without its eclat, and, I fancy, more in your line than commerce.”

Louis’s lip curled. “I have no more intention of being a professor than of being a merchant,” he said in his cold, precise voice. “I shall write.”

“Ah!” M. Dupont drew a sigh of relief. He had feared the boy would be forbiddingly reticent. “I hoped as much from your letters. Your refinement of mind and style are remarkable for a man of your years. Shall you write plays?”

A faint color had invaded the youth’s cheeks under this considered flattery, and when he lifted his deeply set gray eyes to M. Dupont’s it was almost with the frankness of man to man. But he was intensely shy, and although more at his ease with this handsome, genial patron of his family, he made his confidences without warmth.

“No. I shall write the novel. The dramatic form does not appeal to me.”

“Ah! Yes. I am not surprised. Your style is certainly more narrative–descriptive. But to be a novelist, my son, you must have seen a great deal of life. You must know the great world–unless–perhaps–you contemplate writing romance?”

Again the delicate lip opposite curled, and Louis almost choked over his morsel of duck. “Romance? No, Monsieur. I am a realist by temperament and mental habit. Nor do I need the great world. Only one thing interests me–crime.”

“Crime? Mon Dieu!” The amiable merchant almost choked in his turn, although he savored his duck more slowly than his Lycee guest. “Crime! But you are too young, my son, to be interested in anything so grim. Life is to enjoy. And how can you enjoy with your mind like a morgue?”

“We are not all made to enjoy in the same fashion. I enjoy intensely reading through old volumes of criminal records and trials–my master in psychology has kindly arranged that I shall have access to them. And I read with the greatest interest the details of current criminology. I shall never care for society, for I am too timid and dislike women. But I love the lonely grandeur of nature, and music, and great books and pictures. Have no fear, Monsieur, my mind is not polluted. It is purely scientific, this interest; the psychology of crime happens to appeal to my peculiar gifts.”

“But–that is it–your gifts are literary–but yes! I do not like the idea of wasting them on that lamentable subdivision of human society which one ignores save when held up by a footpad. With but few exceptions it has appealed only to the inferior order of writing talent. Even in France the masters do not condescend. With them crime is an incident, not a motif.”

“Has it occurred to you, Monsieur, that without the pioneers–“

“Oh yes, perhaps–but you–“

“I am young and unknown? Of what author has that not at least once been said? I purpose to write novels–not mere stories–in which character and life shall be revealed in the light of the boldest and the subtlest crimes–murder preferably–and executed in a form and style above cavil–I hope! Oh, I hope! Moreover, I shall write my books in two languages–I have taken special courses in English. In that, too, I shall be unique.”

“Be careful of that style of yours, my son. It is growing a little too academic, and I, a Frenchman, say that! It would do for the essay, and win the praise of the expiring generation of critics, and the younger but non-creative formalists, but I infer you wish to be read by the public. You would also make money as well as achieve fame. Is it not?”

“Quite so. My father wishes that I live until I am thirty in California and vote–I, mon Dieu! But I shall follow his wishes. Then I shall buy a chateau here in France, for our chateaux are incomparable in beauty. Fame, but yes. It would make my nostrils quiver. But all that is as nothing to the joy of writing. Then my soul almost sings. I am almost happy, but not quite.”

He paused and his brow darkened. He raised his eyes and stared past his anxious host, far into some invisible plane of tormentingly elusive dreams. M. Dupont wisely remained silent, and Louis resumed, abruptly: “When I shall write as spontaneously as the spring bubbles or the ice melts, when my brain hardly knows what my pen is doing, when I experience that terrific uprush that would drown the more conscious parts of the intellect were it not for the perfect mastery of technique–that is it, monsieur! I am still an infant with my tools. Do not permit my style to cause you anxiety. It is merely in one stage of experiment. I shall not write a line for publication until I am four-and-twenty. I shall send forth my first professional novel on the third of October–my birthday–1900. Meanwhile, I enter the university this year, and take the course in literature. At twenty-two I shall graduate and take my Ph.D. Then I shall serve for a year as a reporter on a London newspaper. So shall I obtain perfect freedom with the English language and that first-hand contact with life which I realize is of a certain necessity. But after that no more of the world. I hate it–realities. I wish to live in my mind, my imagination; to spend every hour when I do not exercise for my nerves or sleep to refresh my faculty, in writing, writing–that one day shall be creating.”

Louis carried out his programme to the letter, and published, in 1900–some five years before the terrific episode which it is my melancholy privilege to chronicle–the first of those novels of crime that commanded the sedate attention of the intellectual world. Entombed as it were in the old house under the creaking eucalyptus-trees, with a padlock on his gate, he had rewritten it six times from the original draft–which, according to his method, contained nothing but the stark outline of the plot, every detail of which was thought out during long hours of exterior immobility. Three successive sets of servants, mistaking this accomplishment in petrifaction for a form of insanity which might at any moment express itself in violence, left abruptly. Finally, old Madame Dupont established in the kitchen wing an elderly Frenchman and his wife who had once presided over a hotel for artists, and thereafter Louis had peace and enforced nutrition.

It was during the long months of re-writing, of developing his characters by a subtle secondary method of his own, of profound analysis, and a phrasing which drew heavily on the adjectival vocabulary of the critics later on, that he really enjoyed himself. The last revision was devoted exclusively to the study and improvement of every sentence in the long book; and indeed there is no doubt that these months, from skeleton to trousseau, were, with one tremendous exception, the happiest period of this unhappy creator’s life.

This book in its cold intellectual remoteness appealed as little to Louis when he read it in print as it did to the public, and he set himself grimly to work to pour red blood into the veins of his characters and give his next book the rhythm of life as well as of style. Once more he was hailed by the intellectuals, but fell short of popular recognition, which, belonging himself to the intellectual democracy, he estimated far above the few who win their little fame by writing about the creators in art, or even above the artist himself. He was determined to enthrall, to create the perfect illusion. He scorned to be a cult, and when he saw himself alluded to as a “high-brow-lit” he wept. But above all he passionately wished for that intoxication in creation in which consciousness of self was obliterated, the power, as he expressed it, to write one book charged with the magnetism of a burning soul. He always felt, despite his love of his work, as cold and deliberate as a mathematician. And yet he spun his complicated plots with the utmost facility. There was no more doubt of his talent, in the minds of those who wrote essays of him in the reviews, than of his psychological insight and his impeccable style.

Poor Louis! Spurred on by his anxious and experienced friend, M. Cesar Dupont, he made a meticulous attempt to adore a little French milliner; but the young artist, who would have been a monk in the Middle Ages and left to his monastery a precious heritage of illuminated manuscripts, returned within the month to his art (with abject apologies), set his teeth, and dissected the whole affair for his next book; presenting Celeste, the pivot of a demoniacal crime, in all the phases, common or uncommon, to a woman of her type. This novel, which he estimated as his worst, achieved to his disgust a certain measure of popularity, and the reporters hammered at his gate. San Francisco, which after its first mild interest, had forgotten him, awoke to a sense of its own importance, and besieged M. Dupont, whose acquaintance extended far beyond the French colony, for introductions. But Louis would have none of them. He went on writing his novels, taking his walks at midnight, never leaving the house otherwise unless to visit a bookstore or sit in the back of a box at the play, and literally knew no one in the city of his birth but old Madame Dupont, her son, and his two old servants, Philippe and Seraphine. It was after his seventh novel, when he felt himself growing stale, taking less pleasure in the mere act of writing, and losing his hold on his good friends, the intellectuals, that he took his trouble, as was his habit, to M. Cesar.

They dined in the old Dupont mansion on Nob Hill, built, like the humbler home of the Bacs, in the city’s youth, and alone, as Madame was in bed with an influenza. M. Cesar as a rule entertained at his club, and had a luxurious suite for bachelor purposes in a select apartment-like house kept by a compatriot, but, like a dutiful son, he made a pretense of sharing his mother’s evening meal at six o’clock, no matter where he might be dining at eight.

For an hour after dinner Louis paced up and down the library and unburdened himself while M. Cesar smoked in the depths of a chair. This confidence, which included rage at his own limitations, disgust with the critics who encouraged such miserable failures as he, and invective against fate for planting the fiction imp in what should have been a purely scientific mind and then withholding the power to electrify his talent with genius, was made about every seven months, and M. Cesar always listened with deep concern and sympathy. He loved Louis, who was sweet of nature and the most inoffensive of egoists, but was beginning to regard him as hopeless. To-night, however, he was admitting a ray of hope.

“Celeste was a failure,” he said, abruptly. “It is no use for you to try that sort of thing again. But live you must. I have given up a dinner at the club to a distinguished guest from abroad to tell you that I insist you give yourself one more chance.”

“What is that?” Louis was alert and suspicious at once.

“Do you remember Berthe?”

“Berthe–your niece at Neuilly?”

“Ah–you do, although you would go to my brother’s house so seldom.”

“He had grown daughters of whom I was afraid, for their cruel instincts were excited by my shyness. But Berthe was a little thing then, very pretty, very sympathetic. I romped with her in the garden sometimes.”

“Just so. Berthe is now twenty, very handsome, very vivacious–a great admirer of M. Louis Bac, celebrated novelist.”

The young Frenchman stared at the elderly Frenchman. “Do you wish that I should marry her?”

“For your sake. For hers–to marry a genius whose vampire mistress is his art–ah, well, it is the fate of woman to be sacrificed when they do not sacrifice us. And Berthe’s would be no mean destiny. I feel convinced that she alone could make you fall madly in love–“

“I shall never see her again. I have lost my old longing for Paris. What difference where a failure exists and plods? Besides, I dreamed once of returning to Paris a master, not a mere formalist who had won the approval of antiquarians.”

“You shall meet her here.”

“Here?”

“She arrives to-morrow.”

“You have planned this, then, deliberately?”

“It is only a dream promising to come true. Not until now has my brother relented and given his consent to Berthe’s taking the long journey. But friends were coming It is fate, my son. Try to fall in love with her–but madly! I, who have loved many times, assure you that the intoxication which tempts lesser men to rhyme should stimulate your great gift to its final expression.”

“But marry!” Louis was quite cold. “A wife in my house! Oh no, M. Cesar; I should hate it and her.”

“Not if you loved her. And Berthe has subtlety and variety.”

“And is far too good for me. I should make a detestable husband.”

“Let her make the husband.”

Once more Louis turned cold. “You desire that I shall meet her, talk to her, cultivate her? Oh, God!”

“I mean that you shall go to my tailor to-morrow. My mother will introduce Berthe to the Colony on Friday night. Its most distinguished members will be present–bankers, journalists, merchants, professional men of all sorts; young people will come in for a dance after the dinner of twenty-four. You may run away from the dance, but at the dinner you will sit beside Berthe.”

This time Louis was petrified. “But no! No!”

M. Cesar rose and laid his hand solemnly on his young friend’s shoulder. “For your art, my son, for your divine gift. For both you would lay down your life. Is it not? Another year of this unnatural existence and you will go sterile. And what substitute for you in the long years ahead? Your mind needs a powerful stimulant and at once. The cup approaches your lip. Will you drink or will you turn it upside down?”

“I’ll drink if I can,” said Louis, through his set teeth, “for what you say is true. But I’d rather drink hemlock.”

Louis sat at his bedroom window, for the moon was high and the night was clear. The city that so often was shrouded to its cobblestones in fog, its muffled ghostly silence broken only by his creaking eucalyptus-trees, lay below him in all its bleak gray outlines. But he was not looking at the city, although sensible for the first time of the vast composite presence under the ugly roofs; nor even at the high-flung beauty of Twin Peaks; he stared instead at the cross on Calvary, that gaunt hill that rises above the cemeteries of Lone Mountain. The cross stood out black and austere save when a fog wraith from the sea drifted across it. The emblem of the cross was in tune with his mood to-night, for he felt neither romantic nor imaginative, but pervaded with fear and melancholy. The faith in which he had been bred as a child had long since passed, and to him the cross was merely the symbol of crucifixion.

His eye dropped from the cross to the dark mass of the Catholic cemetery where his parents slept. If his writing faculty should desert him, as M. Cesar had ruthlessly predicted, no power in either world should condemn him to life. He would go out to Lone Mountain, shut himself in the family vault, lie down on the stones, and either drink poison or cut his wrists. This morbid vision had appealed to him before, but never so insidiously as to-night: never before had his spirits remained so persistently at zero as during the past week; never before had their melancholy been darkened by fear, rent by panic.

In spite of his shyness and dislike of women, not only had he nerved himself to the ordeal of meeting Berthe Dupont, but worked himself up to a real desire to fall in love with her, to experience that tremendous emotion from inception to crescendo and liberate the deep creative torrents of his genius. Not for a moment did he hope that she would marry him. On the contrary, what he particularly desired was that she should play with him, enthrall him, transform him into a sentimental ass and a caldron of passion, then flout him, condemn him to the fiendish tortures of the unsatisfied lover.

Six months at his desk of carefully nursed passion and torments, and then, immortal fame!

Louis, who was very honest and as little conceited as an author may be, had for some time believed, with his critics and M. Cesar, that he would come into the full fruition of his gifts only after some great, possibly terrific, adventure of the soul had banished forever that curious lethargy that possessed the unexplored tracts of his genius.

Therefore had poor Louis gone to the tailor of his inexorable mentor, and crawled up the hill on Friday night, his heart hammering, his knees trembling, but his teeth set and his whole being a desperate hope. He was willing to go to the stake. Through his consciousness the outlines of another plot, subtle, intricate, vital, hinting at characters who were personalities, but uncommonly misty and slow to cohere, were wandering. Ordinarily his plots were as sharply outlined as a winter tree against a frosty sky. But now! He must tear up his soul by the roots and fill his veins with fire or this new conception would dribble forth in an image so commonplace that he would take it out to Lone Mountain and immure it with himself.

The Dupont house was perched high above the cut that had made a rough hillside into a bland street for the wealthy. The last automobile was rolling away as Louis reached the long flight of covered outer stairs that led up from the street to the house. He walked even more slowly up that tunnel on end, hoping the company would be in the dining-room when he arrived and he could slink into his seat unnoticed.

The old butler, Jean-Marie, almost shoved him into the drawing-room, and for a moment his terrors retreated before a wave of artistic pleasure never before experienced in the house of Dupont. The heavy old mahogany furniture, the bow-windows, even the clumsy old candelabra were completely obliterated by a thousand American Beauty roses. It was a bower of surpassing richness and distinction for a group of women as handsome and exquisitely dressed as Louis had ever seen in the foyer of the opera-house in Paris.

The moment old Madame Dupont, magnificent in brocade and a new wig, espied him, she led the way to the dining-room, before M. Cesar could introduce him to the eager Colony. This relieved Louis almost to the pitch of elation, and he even exchanged a few words with his partner after they were seated at the long table–covered with Madame’s historic silver and crystal–the while he covertly examined the young lady on his left. Mademoiselle Berthe had been taken in by the host and was chatting animatedly with M. Jules Constant, a young banker, who sat opposite.

Louis observed with delight that she was more than pretty, and realized that M. Cesar had with purpose restrained his enthusiasm. Certainly it gave Louis a distinct throb of satisfaction to discover for himself that the young girl was beautiful and of no common type. She might be as practical as most Frenchwomen, but she looked romantic, passionate, mysterious. The heavy lids of her large brown eyes gave them depths and smoldering fires. Her soft brown hair, dark but full of light, was dressed close to her small proud head. She had a haughty little nose and a red babyish mouth filled with bright, even teeth. Her complexion was olive and claret; her tall form round, flexible, carried with pride and grace. The contrasts in that seductive face were affecting her inflammable vis-a-vis profoundly.

It was only when dinner was half over that Louis realized with a shock which turned him as pale as his rival, M. Constant, that he felt neither jealousy nor any other of the master passions. He had talked alternately with Mademoiselle Berthe and the shy damsel on his right, and he found the one as interesting as the other. He appreciated that the young lady destined for him was intelligent, and emanated a warm magnetism; moreover, she had both coquetry and indubitable sincerity. Every man at the table was craning his neck, and M. Constant looked ready to fight twelve duels.

And he, Louis Bac, felt nothing!…

Staring at Calvary, his mind drifted over the events of the past week. He had seen Mademoiselle Berthe every day. On two separate occasions he had talked with her alone in the Dupont library. He had liked and admired her increasingly. He found her full of surprises, subtleties; it seemed to him that just such a young woman had been roaming the dim corridors of his brain, impatiently awaiting his call; and as a wife she would be incomparable.

But he did not want a wife. He wanted a grande passion. And he developed not a symptom. He felt not the least desire to impropriate her. Of course there was but one explanation. He was incapable of those profound and racking passions experienced once at least by ordinary men. He was nothing but an intellect with a rotten spot where fiction generated instead of those abnormal impulses that made of men so inflicted social outlaws. Otherwise, he should be quite mad over Berthe Dupont. Her beauty and charm were attracting attention far beyond the French colony. It was Berthe for him or no one. And alas! it was to be neither Berthe nor any one…

The moon flooded the sleeping city as the clocks struck one. Out of that vast composite below, its imagination liberated in dreams, a daring idea sprang, flew upward, darted into Louis’s relaxed brain. Its point wedged, quivered like an arrow. Louis himself quivered, but with fright. Of love and woman he had no personal knowledge save for his brief and shallow episode with Celeste, but of both he had the accumulated knowledge of the masters and the insight of genius.

It was night–a beautiful, romantic night. Berthe was beautiful, seductive at all times; what must she not be in the abandon of sleep? If he could steal to her chamber, gaze upon her unconscious loveliness, was it not categorical that he should be overwhelmed like any ordinary man? To defy her scorn for a few poignant moments, then rush forth repulsed and quite mad, to weep upon his floor until dawn! He stared at the boards of his ascetic chamber with fascinated eyes;…to writhe there, to beat the floor with his fists, to weep like a good Frenchman…And he knew that she had gone to bed early to-night, worn out with much gaiety.

He ran lightly down the stairs and let himself out of the house as silently, although his servants slept far in the rear. Even at the top of the hill not a policeman nor a chance pedestrian was in sight. San Francisco, he knew, had a roaring night life, but at this hour the domestic quarters were as silent as a necropolis.

Nor did he meet any one as he walked rapidly along Taylor Street past the dwellings of the rich to the old-fashioned row of houses perched high above the “cut.” As he was within a foot of the Dupont mansion he heard a taxicab in his wake, and darted within the sheltering walls of the covered stair. The cab came to a halt before the house opposite; a man with a black bag jumped out, and was immediately admitted.

A doctor, of course; but Louis, to his surprise, discovered that he was experiencing something like a thrill. If seen, he certainly would be handed over to the police. It was, therefore, a moment of real danger, and he almost laughed aloud as he discovered himself enjoying it. Many times he had described, with the most searching analysis, that sensation of fear during moments of imminent detection–even that subtle thrill along the nerves–but he was in search of an emotion that should shake his passions loose, and he ran lightly up the stairs, dismissing even the agreeable idea that he was also to experience the sensation of being his own housebreaker, so to speak. When he reached the upper terrace he took off his shoes and carried them to a little pagoda behind the house; it was possible that he would have to make a hasty exit by way of Jones Street. Before leaving his shelter he looked out warily; but the neighboring houses were black, and behind the windows of the Dupont library was a row of tall eucalyptus-trees planted as a windbreak. It was by one of the library windows that Louis purposed to enter, for he knew that its catch was broken; Jean-Marie’s memory was old and intermittent.

He raised the window without difficulty and stepped into the room. It was impenetrably dark and full of furniture. On a pedestal was a vase that had belonged to Napoleon, wired and fastened down as an assurance against earthquake. But Louis knew every detail of that room; he crept down its length without encountering a chair, and opened the door.

In the hall a dim light burned. He listened intently, still with a humorous sense that he felt as like a burglar as any he had ever created. But he experienced no impulse to steal and complete the chain of his sensations. His brain, which registered impressions automatically, was quite normal.

He stole up the stair. Not a step creaked. The upper hall also was dimly lit. He knew that Madame had given the jeune fille the room next to hers, but the connecting door was sure to be closed, for the old lady was a light sleeper and minimized disturbance.

There lay the danger. If Madame heard the slightest sound she would ring the bell connecting with the servants’ rooms in the mansard. He tiptoed to her door. She was snoring gently. He walked as softly to a door some ten feet down the hall and turned the knob. It yielded, and he entered the room where Berthe Dupont slept. The young lady was friendly to modern hygiene and the window stood wide open. The radiant moonlight streamed in. Louis, his heart thumping, but his head cool and his hands quiet, walked over to the bed. Berthe lay with her arms tossed outward, her head thrown back, as if consciously drawing attention to the classic outlines under the firm flesh. Her magnificent dark hair streamed over the pillow.

It should have been an entrancing picture, but for some reason it was not. In a moment Louis, with his inexorable eye for detail, realized the peccancy. The young lady’s classic face was slightly swollen from sleep, and pallid; her lips were puffed, and blew out, albeit noiselessly, as the regular breath exhaled.

Nevertheless, it was Berthe, and she slept. This was her bedroom, her maiden bower, inviolate by man. She was at his mercy. Why, then, did he not feel that intoxication of the senses, that unreckoning fury of the male, that would have favored any young blood of the French colony? He did not. He merely gazed resentfully at that diminished beauty. His artistic soul curled up. Far from feeling the sensations of the inexorable lover, his mind turned black with anger both at her and at himself. He hated her unreasonably for disappointing him, for failing to melt the ice in his blood. Well, he had seen the last of her. To-morrow he would shut himself up once more and by a supreme effort of will compel his brain to yield up its skulking treasures.

He turned to leave the room, then shrugged his shoulders and approached the bed, this time more stealthily. Why not give her a fright? That would be something to the credit side of this fiasco, which, he reflected with disgust, involved an insult to the best of his friends. He would make her believe she was being murdered, then get out while she was still too terrified and breathless to cry for help.

His first idea was to press his hands about her throat and choke her gently, not even enough to leave a mark, but quite sufficient to make her kick and writhe with terror. But in that case she would see him–he had not even worn his hat. He picked up a pillow she had tossed to the floor and pressed it against her face. She made a sudden downward movement, gurgling. He pressed more firmly, his eye measuring the distance to the door. But the gurgle affected him oddly. He desired to stop it.

Suddenly he knew that she was awake. She not only attempted to leap upward, but her strong hands clutched the pillow frantically. He had not thought of her arms, of those strong, shapely hands he had admired. With a quick catlike leap he was on her chest, his knees hard against her lungs; he caught her hands in one of his, pressing his other arm along that portion of the pillow that covered her nose and mouth. The blood was running swiftly through his veins. His head was light and full of pleasant noises. Suddenly he realized that the tense, strong young body of the girl was relaxing, and he felt a joy so fierce, so profound, so complete, that he could have shouted aloud a welcome to his liberated soul and passions as they tore through those ice barriers at last and found their transports in this sublime act of taking life.

For Louis had forgotten his original intention merely to terrify. The literary cultures in his brain had suddenly become personal and imperative. He was as ruthless as man ever is when supreme desire and opportunity coincide, whether the lust be for woman or the enemy on the battle-field. He meant to kill Berthe Dupont and gratify the clamoring male within him to the full. This was his moment. He was no assassin by natural inclination, and but for this providential set of conditions would have gone to his grave a little bourgeois, a literary machine with as frail a hold on his talents as a singer on a voice that had never been placed.

The body lay limp and flabby at last. He was about to remove the pillow, but his artistic soul uncurled itself and made indignant protest. He lifted the clammy hand and felt the pulse. It was still. So was the heart to which he laid his ear briefly.

Although there was still that ecstatic riot in his veins, his brain was by no means confused, and prompted his subsequent acts as coherently as if he were at his desk, pen in hand. He listened at Madame’s door. She still slept rhythmically. He opened the drawers of the bureau and chiffonnier and strewed the contents about the room. In a compartment of the desk he found a loose pile of gold