The writing was Tom Castleton’s; and the writing of the script hastily flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton’s—­Tom Castleton, the one genius of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.  There was no mistake.  The great square virile hand was only too familiar—­as different from Adrian’s precise, academical writing as Tom Castleton from Adrian.

Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.

There was the original manuscript of “The Diamond Gate.”  “The Diamond Gate” was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton.  Adrian had stolen “The Diamond Gate” from a dead man.  Not only from a dead man, but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.

We stared at each other open-mouthed.  At last Jaffery threw up his hands and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe.  Quickly we ran through the mass.  We could not trust ourselves to speak.  There are times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought.  We found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves.  The apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest.  Again we examined it.  A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful certainty.

The great epoch-making novel did not exist.

It had never existed.  Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no possibility of existing.

“What in God’s name has he been playing at?” cried Jaffery, in his great, hoarse bass.

“God knows,” said I.

But even as I spoke, I knew.

I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned Cell.  The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold.  I was chilled to the bone.  Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and hugged me kindly.

“Go and get warm,” said he.

“But this?” I pointed to the litter.

“I’ll see to it and join you in a minute.”

He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet and hands.  I was alone.  Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day.  It was just as well she had gone, I thought.  I should have a few hours to compose some story in mitigation of the tragedy.

Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank.  He sat down on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse and innumerable furrows.  But for the blaze the room was filled with the yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of turning on the lights.

“What have you done?” I asked.

“Locked the stuff up again,” he replied.  “This afternoon I’ll bring a portmanteau and take it away.”