Again we examined it.

A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful certainty.
The great epoch-making novel did not exist.
It had never existed.

Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no possibility of existing.
"What in God's name has he been playing at ?" cried Jaffery, in his great, hoarse bass.
"God knows," said I.
But even as I spoke, I knew.
I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned Cell.

The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold.

I was chilled to the bone.