“Tucker.  Leading man in ‘The Sunken City.’  Look at Grimshaw, will you?  We mustn’t be too long—­”

I went to the poet.  The inevitable monocle was still caught and held by the yellow thatch of his thick brow.  He was breathing slowly.

“Grimshaw,” I said, touching his forehead, “open your eyes.”

He did so, and I was startled by the expression of despair in their depths.  “Ah,” he-said, “it’s the psychopathologist.”

“How did this happen?”

He sat up—­I am convinced that he had been faking that drunken sleep—­and stared at the sprawling figure on the floor.  “Tucker quarrelled with me,” he said.  “I knocked him down and his forehead struck against the table.  Then he crawled over here and died.  From fright, d’you think?” He shuddered.  “Take him away, Waram, will you?  I’ve got work to do.”

Suddenly Esther Levenson spoke in a flat voice, without emotion:  “It isn’t true!  He struck him with that silver statuette.  Like this——­” She made a violent gesture with both arms.  “And before God in heaven, I’ll make him pay for it.  I will!  I will!  I will!”

“Keep still,” I said sharply.

Grimshaw looked up at her.  He made a gesture of surrender.  Then he smiled.  “Simonetta,” he said, “you are no better than the rest.”

She sobbed, ran over to him, and went down on her knees, twisting her arms about his waist.  There was a look of distaste in Grimshaw’s eyes; he stared into her distraught face a moment, then he freed himself from her arms and got to his feet.

“I think I’ll telephone to Dagmar,” he said.

But Waram shook his head.  “I’ll do that.  I’m sorry, Grimshaw; the police will have to know.  While we’re waiting for them, you might write a letter to Mrs. Grimshaw.  I’ll see that she gets it in the morning.”

I don’t remember whether the poet wrote to Dagmar then or not.  But surely you remember how she stayed by him during the trial—­still Victorian in her black gown and veil, mourning for the hope that was dead, at least!  You remember his imprisonment; the bitter invective of his enemies; the defection of his followers; the dark scandals that filled the newspapers, offended public taste, and destroyed Cecil Grimshaw’s popularity in an England that had worshipped him!

Esther Levenson lied to save him.  That was the strangest thing of all.  She denied what she had told us that night of the tragedy.  Tucker, she said, had been in love with her; he followed her to Grimshaw’s house in Chelsea and quarrelled violently with the poet.  His death was an accident.  Grimshaw had not touched the statuette.  When he saw what had happened, he telephoned to Doctor Waram and then lay down on the couch—­apparently fainted there, for he did not speak until Doctor Fenton came.  Waram perjured himself, too—­for Dagmar’s sake.  He had not, he swore, heard the actress speak of a silver statuette, or of revenge before God....  And since there was nothing to prove how the blow had been struck, save the deep dent in Tucker’s forehead, Grimshaw was set free.