Presently Tcheriapin continued: 

“It is the figure of a slender girl—­ah! angels of grace!—­what a girl!” He kissed his hand rapturously.  “She is posed bending gracefully forward, and looking down at her own lovely reflection in the water.  It is a seashore, you remember, and the little ripples play about her ankles.  The first blush of the dawn robes her white body in a transparent mantle of light.  Ah!  God’s mercy! it was as she stood so, in a little cove of Normandy, that I saw her!”

He paused, rolling his dark eyes; and I could hear Andrews’s heavy breathing; then: 

“It was the ’new art’—­the posing of the model not in a lighted studio, but in the scene to be depicted.

“And the fellow who painted her!—­the man with the barbarous name!  Bah! he was big—­as big as our Mr. Andrews—­and ugly—­pooh! uglier than he!  A moon-face, with cropped skull like a prize-fighter and no soul.  But, yes, he could paint.  ’A Dream at Dawn’ was genius—­yes, some soul he must have had.

“He could paint, dear friends, but he could not love.  Him I counted as—­puff!”

He blew imaginary down into space.

“Her I sought out, and presently found.  She told me, in those sweet stolen rambles along the shore, when the moonlight made her look like a Madonna, that she was his inspiration—­his art—­his life.  And she wept; she wept, and I kissed her tears away.

“To please her I waited until ‘A Dream at Dawn’ was finished.  With the finish of the picture, finished also his dream of dawn—­ the moon-faced one’s.”

Tcheriapin laughed, and lighted a fresh cigarette.

“Can you believe that a man could be so stupid?  He never knew of my existence, this big, red booby.  He never knew that I existed until—­until his ‘dream’ had fled—­with me!  In a week we were in Paris, that dream-girl and I—­in a month we had quarrelled.  I always end these matters with a quarrel; it makes the complete finish.  She struck me in the face—­and I laughed.  She turned and went away.  We were tired of one another.

“Ah!” Again he airily kissed his hand.  “There were others after I had gone.  I heard for a time.  But her memory is like a rose, fresh and fair and sweet.  I am glad I can remember her so, and not as she afterward became.  That is the art of love.  She killed herself with absinthe, my friends.  She died in Marseilles in the first year of the great war.”

Thus far Tcheriapin had proceeded, and was in the act of airily flicking ash upon the floor, when, uttering a sound which I can only describe as a roar, Andrews hurled himself upon the smiling violinist.

His great red hands clutching Tcheriapin’s throat, the insane Scotsman, for insane he was at that moment, forced the other back upon the settee from which he had half arisen.  In vain I sought to drag him away from the writhing body, but I doubt that any man could have relaxed that deadly grip.  Tcheriapin’s eyes protruded hideously and his tongue lolled forth from his mouth.  One could hear the breath whistling through his nostrils as Andrews silently, deliberately, squeezed the life out of him.