"Then I am ready. Welcome trial, conviction, death, even. To confront her eye to eye is all I wish. She shall never forget it, never!"
"Then you do not deny——" I began.
"I deny nothing," he returned, and held out his hands with a grim gesture. "How can I, when there falls from everything I touch the devilish thing which took away the life I hated?"
"Have you anything more to say or do before you leave these rooms?" I asked.
He shook his head, and then, bethinking himself, pointed to the roll of paper which he had flung on the table.
"Burn that!" he cried.
I took up the roll and looked at it. It was the manuscript of a poem in blank verse.
"I have been with it into a dozen newspaper and magazine offices," he explained with great bitterness. "Had I succeeded in getting a publisher for it I might have forgotten my wrongs and tried to build up a new life on the ruins of the old. But they would not have it, none of them; so I say, burn it! that no memory of me may remain in this miserable world."
"Keep to the facts!" I severely retorted. "It was while carrying this poem from one newspaper to another that you secured that bit of print upon the blank side of which yourself printed the obituary notice with which you savoured your revenge upon the woman who had disappointed you."
"You know that? Then you know where I got the poison with which I tipped the silly toy with which that weak man fooled away his life?"