CHAPTER II
"I AM VARGE"
CLOSE, Varge had drawn the other to him, and the breath of one was upon the other's cheek. For a moment, that seemed to span eternity in that little chamber, the two forms on the bed held rigid, motionless—and again there had fallen an utter stillness, a silence as of death, a silence in grim harmony now with the black shadow, blacker than the shadow of the night, that lay upon the house.
As a sudden knife gash shocks veins and arteries into inertia for a brief moment before the blood spurts madly from the wound; so, for that moment, Varge's faculties were shocked to numbness at the other's words. Then his fingers on Merton's shoulders shut vise-like. Horror, loathing of the awful deed revolted him; the inhuman selfishness that had tricked and played upon his gratitude, demanding that he should take this hideous crime upon himself, swept him with seething passion—and only the mighty will power, the self-centred grip of the man upon himself, kept back his fingers from flying at the other's throat to wring the breath from the shaking thing that shivered now in his grasp.
No words passed his lips—tighter his fingers closed. Straight out before him he held Merton—and the blackness between them, cloaking their faces, grew tenser charged as the seconds passed, until it seemed
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