in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes. He
shuddered. "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he murmured.

"It is nothing to me. I don't require you," said Campbell coldly.

Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his
portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn
curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had forgotten,
for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas, and was about
to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.

What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one
of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it
was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent
thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose
grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had
not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.

He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with
half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that he
would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down and
taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the picture.

There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard
Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder if
he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had thought of
each other.

"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.

He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a
glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs, he heard the key
being turned in the lock.

It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He was
pale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked me to do," he
muttered "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again."

"You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that," said Dorian
simply.

As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at
the table was gone.

CHAPTER 15

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing
with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner as he
bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps
one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed
that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our
age. Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for
sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He
himself could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a
moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an excellent wife
to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her husband
properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed, and
married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she devoted
herself now to the pleasures of French fiction, French cookery, and
French esprit when she could get it.

Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that
she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "I know, my
dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say,
"and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake. It is most
fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. As it was, our
bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to
raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
However, that was all Narborough's fault. He was dreadfully
short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never
sees anything."

Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was, as she
explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "I think it is
most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "Of course I go and stay
with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old woman
like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them
up. You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure
unadulterated country life. They get up early, because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.
There has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of
Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner. You
shan't sit next either of them. You shall sit by me and amuse me."

Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round the room. Yes: it
was certainly a tedious party. Two of the people he had never seen
before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those


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