struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for Doria, he succumbed.  What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent to Wittekind, the publisher of “The Diamond Gate,” I did not learn till later.  But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton’s original manuscript?  That was what Jaffery could not understand.  Yet any one familiar with morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances.  Some queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim, relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence—­that is the only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can explain the sustained act of folly.

And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man’s soul?  I remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian’s face, at Mr. Jornicroft’s dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and the snapping of the stem of the wineglass.  In the light of knowledge I looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been merely gay before.  Well . . . he had been swept off his feet.  If any man ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria.  For what it may be worth, put that to his credit:  he sinned for love of a woman.  And the rest?  The tragic rest?  His undertaking to write another novel?  Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man.  Careless, casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set himself to do heretofore, he had done.

As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the stupefaction of his friends.  With the exception of a brilliant bar examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack of incentive.  When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse “The Diamond Gate,” I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his capacity.

When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.  He looked forward with a gambler’s eagerness to the autumn’s work, the beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that was Adrian Boldero.  And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm, must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret room.  The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an intellectual Bluebeard’s chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken wife would respect.  It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into the condemned cell.