"I shall really feel very much more comfortable when it's all over," he said. "I don't fancy even lawyers waste as much time as they used to do over this kind of thing. And this case is so simple, so straightforward. I shall be sorry for the Kayes. But they must have known it. I fancy everybody in this neighbourhood knew it. People will pity Athena; they will agree that she had every excuse——"
He leant back in his chair. There was nothing more to say.
"Shall I call Carver?" asked Wantele solicitously.
"No. Not now. But I should be obliged if you will tell him that I shall want him in an hour. I shall try and read for a while by the fire."
Richard Maule waited till he heard the sounds of his cousin's quick footsteps die away. Then he rose feebly and walked over to the recess which had been fitted up as a medicine cupboard in the days of his childhood, when drugs were more the fashion than they are now.
In a wide-necked, glass-stoppered bottle were the crystals of chloral which he had long used in preference to the more usual liquid form. He knew to a nicety the dose which he himself could take with safety, the dose which sometimes failed to induce sleep.
He now measured out in his hand some three times his usual dose.
Had Dick Wantele's answer been different, Richard Maule would have administered to himself the crystals he now held in his hand. But Dick's decision—what the man of average morality would have regarded as his noble and unselfish decision—had signed another human being's death-warrant.
The thought that this was so suddenly struck Richard Maule as the most ironic of the many avenging things he had known to happen in our strange world. And, almost for the first time since he had formed his awful conception of the meaning of life, he knew the cruel joy of laughing with the gods, instead of writhing under their lash.