I drove up to the sombre house, and ran up the steps, and knocked. The
door, in a little time, was opened by a tall woman in black silk. She
looked ill, and as if she had been crying. She curtseyed, and heard my
question, but she did not answer. She turned her face away, extending
her hand towards two men who were coming down-stairs; and thus having,
as it were, tacitly made me over to them, she passed through a side-door
hastily and shut it.

The man who was nearest the hall, I at once accosted, but being now
close to him, I was shocked to see that both his hands were covered with
blood.

I drew back a little, and the man, passing downstairs, merely said in a
low tone, "Here's the servant, sir."

The servant had stopped on the stairs, confounded and dumb at seeing me.
He was rubbing his hands in a handkerchief, and it was steeped in blood.

"Jones, what is it? what has happened?" I asked, while a sickening
suspicion overpowered me.

The man asked me to come up to the lobby. I was beside him in a moment,
and, frowning and pallid, with contracted eyes, he told me the horror
which I already half guessed.

His master had made away with himself.

I went upstairs with him to the room--what I saw there I won't tell you.
He had cut his throat with his razor. It was a frightful gash. The two
men had laid him on the bed, and composed his limbs. It had happened, as
the immense pool of blood on the floor declared, at some distance
between the bed and the window. There was carpet round his bed, and a
carpet under his dressing-table, but none on the rest of the floor, for
the man said he did not like a carpet on his bedroom. In this sombre and
now terrible room, one of the great elms that darkened the house was
slowly moving the shadow of one of its great boughs upon this dreadful
floor.

I beckoned to the servant, and we went downstairs together. I turned off
the hall into an old-fashioned panelled room, and there standing, I
heard all the servant had to tell. It was not a great deal.

"I concluded, sir, from your words, and looks, sir, as you left last
night, that you thought my master was seriously ill. I thought it might
be that you were afraid of a fit, or something. So I attended very close
to your directions. He sat up late, till past three o'clock. He was not
writing or reading. He was talking a great deal to himself, but that was
nothing unusual. At about that hour I assisted him to undress, and left
him in h