The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. l"l
minutes in a hansom, and he would be in his lodgings, and there
would be no excuse for delay. His time would have come before
the clock of St. James's Church struck midnight. He had looked at
his pistol-case involuntarily while he was dressing for the evening.
He knew where it stood ready to his hand; and close beside the
pistol-case was a business-like letter from his landlord requesting
the settlement of a long account for rent and maintenance—only
such breakfasts and casual meals as a young man of fashion takes at
his lodgings—which had mounted to formidable figures. And an
ounce of lead was to be the sole settlement. For the first time in
his life Mr. Hillersdon felt sorry for those eminently respectable
people, his landlord and landlady. He began to consider whether
ho ought not at least to shoot himself out of doors, rather than to
inflict upon an old-established lodging-house the stigma of a suicide;
but the inconvenience of self-destruction sul) jove was too apparent
to him, and he felt that he must be selfish in this final act of a
selfish life.
\"es, there sat Justin Jermj'n, complacent, full of enjoyment; the
man who had told him what he was going to do. How the modern
sorcerer would pride himself upon that fore-knowledge to-morrow
when the evening papers told of the deed that had been done.
There would doubtless be a paragraph in the papers—three lines at
most—and perhaps a line on the contents bill: Disteessing
SxnciDE OF A Gentleman. Suicides are always described as
distressing when the self-slaughterer is of gentle blood.
He felt angry with Jermyn for having contrived to haunt these
closing hours of his life. He sat watching the sorcerer all through
the last act of the opera, noting his elfin enjoyment of all that was
diabolical in the music and the libretto. How he gi-inned at tho
discomfiture of Don Giovanni! how he rocked himself with
laughter at the abject terror of Leperello ! No one approached him
as an acquaintance. He sat in complete isolation, but in supreme
enjoyment, apparently the happiest man in that great theatre, the
youngest and the freshest in the capacity to enjoy,
" And that laughing fool read my purpose as if my. brain had
been an open book," mused Hillersdon savagely.
His anger was not lessened when he glanced round while he was
conducting Mrs, Champion to her carriage, and saw the Fate-
reader's slim, supple figure behind him, and the Fate-reader's
gnome-like countenance smiling at him under an opera hat,
"I am so sorry you are leaving London so soon," said Edith
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