How well he remembered it all! Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round.

He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away.

How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him! But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this.

He had the key, and no one else could enter it.

Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean.