Page:Weird Tales v01n04 (1923-06).djvu/87

 'A Gripping, Powerful Story by a Man Who Always Tells a Good Tale'

HE OUTCOME was all the more regrettable because Henry Fayne had staked so much on the success of his great venture. He had renounced innumerable bachelor friendships for Leanor, only to discover within a year of the celebrated social event, which had been their wedding, that he was linked for life to a captivating adventuress.

It was a hard blow. Only by desperate efforts, long sustained, had he been able to take himself in hand and force out of his thoughts the ugly images that obsessed him.

Leanor's perfidy was a thing of which even his best friends never could have convinced him; yet now he knew it to be true—aye, knew it because she herself had boasted of it!

Fayne had striven hard to shut so hideous a specter out of his vision, partly because of a haunting fear that the thing which the discovery had set throbbing in his brain would get the better of him, that he would hurt somebody, or himself.



He had been an unusually well-balanced man, but it was only after many a stern struggle with the pulsating thing that hammered in his head that he surrendered the corpse of his outraged love to the divorce court and the gossip-mon-