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“He took it from this,” Henley said to himself. Yes, that was obvious. Trenchard had described the prison-house of despair, where the two victims of a strange, desolating habit shut themselves up to sink, with a curious minuteness. He had even devoted a paragraph to the tall iron gate, whose round handle he had written of as “bald, and exposed to the wind from the river, the paint having long since been worn off it.” In the twilight Henley bent down and examined the handle of the gate. The paint seemed to have been scraped from it.

“How curiously real that book has become to me!” he muttered. “I could almost believe that if I knocked upon that door, and was let in, I should find Olive Beauchamp stretched on a couch in the room that lies beyond those gaunt, shuttered windows.”

He gave a last glance at the house, and as he did so he fancied that he heard a slight cry come from it to him. He listened attentively and heard nothing more. Then he walked away toward home.

When he reached his room, he found upon his table the envelope which Trenchard had directed to him. He opened it, and unwrapped the key from the inclosed sheet of note-paper, on which were written these words:

“Dear Jack,

“I am off again. And this time I can’t say when I shall be back. In any case, I have completed my part of the book, and leave the finishing of it in your hands. This is the key of the drawer in which I have locked the manuscript. You have not seen most of the last volume. Read it, and judge for yourself whether the denouement can be anything but utterly tragic. I will not outline to you what I have thought of for it. If you have any difficulty about the finale, I shall be able to help you with it even if you do not see me again for some time. By the way, what nonsense that saying is, ‘Dead men tell no tales!’ Half the best tales in the world are told, or at least completed, by dead men.

“Yours ever,

“A. T.”

Henley laid this note down and turned cold all over. It was the concluding sentence which had struck a chill through his heart. He took the key in his hand, went down to Trenchard’s room, unlocked the drawer in his writing-table, and took out the manuscript. What did Andrew mean by that sinister sentence? A tale completed by a dead man! Henley sat down by the fire with the manuscript in his hands and began to read. He was called away to dinner; but immediately afterward he returned to his task, and till late into the night his glance travelled down the closely-written sheets one after the other, until the light from the candles grew blurred and indistinct, and his eyes ached. But still he read on. The power and gloom of Andrew’s narrative held him in a vice, and then he was searching for a clue in the labyrinth of words. At last he came to the final paragraph, and then to the final sentence:

“But at length he laid his hand upon the door that divided him from Fate.”

Henley put the sheet down carefully upon the table. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the room seemed full of a strange, breathless cold, the peculiar chilliness that precedes the dawn. The fire was burning brightly enough, yet the warmth it emitted scarcely seemed to combat the frosty air that penetrated from without, and Henley shivered as he rose from his seat. His brows were drawn together, and he was thinking deeply. A light seemed slowly struggling into his soul. That last sentence of Tren-chard’s connected itself with what he had seen in the afternoon on the Chelsea Embankment. “He laid his hand upon the door that divided him from Fate.”