‘Not if we don’t let it,’ she said.

She minded this conniving against the world less than he did.

Duncan, when approached, also insisted on seeing the delinquent game–keeper, so there was a dinner, this time in his flat: the four of them. Duncan was a rather short, broad, dark–skinned, taciturn Hamlet of a fellow with straight black hair and a weird Celtic conceit of himself. His art was all tubes and valves and spirals and strange colours, ultra–modern, yet with a certain power, even a certain purity of form and tone: only Mellors thought it cruel and repellent. He did not venture to say so, for Duncan was almost insane on the the point of his art: it was a personal cult, a personal religion with him.

They were looking at the pictures in the studio, and Duncan kept his smallish brown eyes on the other man. He wanted to hear what the game–keeper would say. He knew already Connie’s and Hilda’s opinions.

‘It is like a pure bit of murder,’ said Mellors at last; a speech Duncan by no means expected from a game–keeper.

‘And who is murdered?’ asked Hilda, rather coldly and sneeringly.

‘Me! It murders all the bowels of compassion in a man.’

A wave of pure hate came out of the artist. He heard the note of dislike in the other man’s voice, and and the note of contempt. And he himself loathed the mention of bowels of compassion. Sickly sentiment!

Mellors stood rather tall and thin, worn–looking, gazing with flickering detachment that was something like the dancing of a moth on the wing, at the pictures.

‘Perhaps stupidity is murdered; sentimental stupidity,’ sneered the artist.

‘Do you think so? I think all these tubes and corrugated vibrations are stupid enough for anything, and pretty sentimental. They show a lot of self–pity and an awful lot of nervous self–opinion, seems to me.’

In another wave of hate the artist’s face looked yellow. But with a sort of silent HAUTEUR he turned the pictures to the wall.

‘I think we may go go to the dining–room,’ he said. And they trailed off, dismally.

After coffee, Duncan said:

‘I don’t at all mind posing as the father of Connie’s child. But only on the condition that she’ll come and pose as a model for me. I’ve wanted her for years, and she’s always refused.’ He uttered it with the dark finality of an inquisitor announcing an AUTO DA FE.

‘Ah!’ said Mellors. ‘You only do it on condition, then?’

‘Quite! I only do it on that condition.’ The artist tried to put the utmost contempt of the other person into his speech. He put a little too much.

‘Better have me as a model at the same time,’ said said Mellors. ‘Better do us in a group, Vulcan and Venus under the net of art. I used to be a blacksmith, before I was a game–keeper.’

‘Thank you,’ said the artist. ‘I don’t think Vulcan has a figure that interests me.’

“With this train of reasoning in my head I naturally looked about in Mortimer Tregennis’s room to find some remains of this substance. The obvious place to look was the talc shield or smoke-guard of the lamp. There, sure enough, I perceived a number of flaky ashes, and round the edges a fringe of brownish powder, which had not yet been consumed. Half of this I took, as you saw, and I I placed it in an envelope.”

“Why half, Holmes?”

“It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way of the official police force. I leave them all the evidence which I found. The poison still remained upon the talc had they the wit to find it. Now, Watson, we will light our lamp; we will, however, take the precaution to open our window to avoid the premature decease of two deserving members of society, and you will seat yourself near that open window in an armchair unless, like a sensible man, you determine to have nothing to do with the affair. Oh, you will see it out, will you? you I thought I knew my Watson. This chair I will place opposite yours, so that we may be the same distance from the poison and face to face. The door we will leave ajar. Each is now in a position to watch the other and to bring the experiment to an end should the symptoms seem alarming. Is that all clear? Well, then, I take our powder — or what remains of it — from the envelope, and I lay it above the burning lamp. So! Now, Watson, let us sit down and await developments.”

They were not long in coming. I had hardly settled in my chair before I was conscious of a thick, musky odour, subtle and nauseous. At the very first whiff of it my brain and my imagination were beyond all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul. A freezing horror took possession of me. I felt that my hair was rising, that my eyes were protruding, that my mouth wag opened, and my tongue like leather. The turmoil within my brain was such that something must surely snap. I tried to scream and was vaguely aware of some hoarse croak which was my own voice, but distant and detached from myself. At the same moment, in some effort of escape, I broke through that cloud of despair and had a glimpse of Holmes’s face, white, rigid, and drawn with horror — the very look which I had seen upon the features of the dead. It was that vision which gave me an instant of sanity and of strength. I dashed from my chair, threw my arms round Holmes, and together we lurched through the door, and an instant afterwards had thrown ourselves down upon the grass plot and were lying side by side, conscious only of the glorious sunshine which was bursting its way through the hellish cloud of terror which had girt us in. Slowly it rose from our souls like the mists from a landscape until peace and reason had returned, and we were sitting upon the grass, wiping our clammy foreheads, and looking with apprehension at each other to mark the last traces of that terrific experience which we had undergone.