rew more real. I began to appreciate it as an actual fact. And
with this realization, the question of my own death arose. I took it for
granted from the first. The burden of solitary existence was not to be
entertained for a moment. The only question was how, and I debated this
in leisurely fashion, sitting on the floor with Kate's hand in mine. I
had a pistol upstairs and, of course, there were keen-edged scalpels in
the laboratory. But, strange as it may appear, the bias of an anatomical
training even then opposed the idea of gross mechanical injuries.
However, there were plenty of poisons available, and to this method I
inclined as more decent and dignified.

"Having settled on the method, I was disposed to put it into practice
at once; but then another consideration arose. My wife would have to be
buried. By some hands she must be laid in her last resting-place, and
those hands could be none other than my own. So I must stay behind for a
little while.

"The hours passed on unreckoned until pencils of cold blue daylight
began to stream in through the chinks of the shutters and contend with
the warm gaslight within. Then another footstep was heard on the stairs
and the cook, Wilson, came into the room. She, like the housemaid,
stopped dead when she saw my wife's corpse, and stood for an instant
staring wildly with her mouth wide open. But only for an instant. The
next she was flying out of the front door, rousing the street with her
screams.

"The advent of the cook roused me. I knew that the police would arrive
soon and I instinctively looked about me to see how this unspeakable
thing had happened. I had already noticed that one of my wife's
hands--the one that I had not been holding--was clenched, and I now
observed that it grasped a little tuft of hair. I drew out a portion of
the tuft and looked at it. It was coarse hair, about three inches long
and a dull gray in color. I laid it on the clean note-paper in the
drawer of the bureau bookcase to examine later, and then glanced around
the room. The origin of the tragedy was obvious. The household plate had
been taken out of the plate chest in the pantry and laid out on the end
of the dining table. There the things stood, their polished surfaces
sullied by the greasy finger-marks of the wretch who had murdered my
wife. At those tell-tale marks I looked with new and growing interest.
Finger-prints, in those days, had not yet been recognized by the public
or the poli