used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the annoyance of his
mother, who had set her heart on his standing for Parliament and had a
vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions. He was
an excellent musician, however, as well, and played both the violin and
the piano better than most amateurs. In fact, it was music that had
first brought him and Dorian Gray together--music and that indefinable
attraction that Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he
wished-- and, indeed, exercised often without being conscious of it.
They had met at Lady Berkshire's the night that Rubinstein played there,
and after that used to be always seen together at the opera and wherever
good music was going on. For eighteen months their intimacy lasted.
Campbell was always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To
him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is
wonderful and fascinating in life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken
place between them no one ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that
they scarcely spoke when they met and that Campbell seemed always to go
away early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present. He had
changed, too--was strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to
dislike hearing music, and would never himself play, giving as his
excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that
he had no time left in which to practise. And this was certainly true.
Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name
appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection
with certain curious experiments.

This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept
glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly
agitated. At last he got up and began to pace up and down the room,
looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides. His
hands were curiously cold.

The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with
feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the
jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting
for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands
his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight
and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The brain
had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made
grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving
masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind,
slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being
dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its
grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him
stone.

At last the door opened and his servant entered. He turned glazed eyes
upon him.

"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.

A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back
to his cheeks.

"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself
again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.

The man bowed and retired. In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.

"Alan! This is kind of you. I thank you for coming."

"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said it
was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and cold. He spoke
with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt in the steady
searching gaze that he turned on Dorian. He kept his hands in the
pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the
gesture with which he had been greeted.

"Yes: it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one
person. Sit down."

Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him. The
two men's eyes met. In Dorian's there was infinite pity. He knew that
what he was going to do was dreadful.

After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very
quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he
had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room
to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.
He has been dead ten hours now. Don't stir, and don't look at me like
that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do not
concern you. What you have to do is this--"

"Stop, Gray. I don't want to know anything further. Whether what you
have told me is true or not true doesn't concern me. I entirely decline
to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to yourself.
They don't interest me any more."

"Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to interest
you. I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can't help myself. You are
the one man who is able to save me. I am forced to bring you into the
matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific. You know about
chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments. What you
have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs-- to destroy it
so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this person come
into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is supposed to be in
Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is missed, there must
be no trace of him found here. You, Alan, you must change him, and


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