history of disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts. And you have, as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a young lady than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her. Was that right, do you think?”

“Right?” I cried in despair. “No! My God, everything is so false, so hellishly stupid and wrong! I am a beast, Mozart, a stupid, angry beast, sick and rotten. There you’re right a thousand times. But as for this girl⁠—it was her own desire. I have only fulfilled her own wish.”

Mozart laughed his noiseless laughter. But he had the great kindness to turn off the wireless.

My self-extenuation sounded unexpectedly and thoroughly foolish even to me who had believed in it with all my heart. When Hermine had once, so it suddenly occurred to me, spoken about time and eternity, I had been ready forthwith to take her thoughts as a reflection of my own. That the thought, however, of dying by my hand had been her own inspiration and wish and not in the least influenced by me I had taken as a matter of course. But why on that occasion had I not only accepted that horrible and unnatural thought, but even guessed it in advance. Perhaps because it had been my own. And why had I murdered Hermine just at the very moment when I saw her lying naked in another’s arms? All-knowing and all-mocking rang Mozart’s soundless laughter.

“Harry,” said he, “you’re a great joker. Had this beautiful girl really nothing to desire of you but the stab of a knife? Keep that for someone else! Well, at least you have stabbed her properly. The poor child is as dead as a mouse. And now perhaps would be an opportune moment to realise the consequences of your gallantry towards this lady. Or do you think of evading the consequences?”

“No,” I cried. “Don’t you understand at all? I evade the consequences? I have no other desire than to pay and pay and pay for them, to lay my head beneath the axe and pay the penalty of annihilation.”