wers stood open; and on the
hearth there lay a pile of grey ashes, as though many papers had been
burned. From these embers the inspector disinterred the butt end of a
green cheque book, which had resisted the action of the fire; the other
half of the stick was found behind the door; and as this clinched his
suspicions, the officer declared himself delighted. A visit to the bank,
where several thousand pounds were found to be lying to the murderer's
credit, completed his gratification.

"You may depend upon it, sir," he told Mr. Utterson: "I have him in my
hand. He must have lost his head, or he never would have left the stick
or, above all, burned the cheque book. Why, money's life to the man.
We have nothing to do but wait for him at the bank, and get out the
handbills."

This last, however, was not so easy of accomplishment; for Mr. Hyde had
numbered few familiars--even the master of the servant maid had only
seen him twice; his family could nowhere be traced; he had never been
photographed; and the few who could describe him differed widely, as
common observers will. Only on one point were they agreed; and that
was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive
impressed his beholders.

INCIDENT OF THE LETTER

It was late in the afternoon, when Mr. Utterson found his way to Dr.
Jekyll's door, where he was at once admitted by Poole, and carried down
by the kitchen offices and across a yard which had once been a garden,
to the building which was indifferently known as the laboratory or
dissecting rooms. The doctor had bought the house from the heirs of
a celebrated surgeon; and his own tastes being rather chemical than
anatomical, had changed the destination of the block at the bottom of
the garden. It was the first time that the lawyer had been received in
that part of his friend's quarters; and he eyed the dingy, windowless
structure with curiosity, and gazed round with a distasteful sense of
strangeness as he crossed the theatre, once crowded with eager
students and now lying gaunt and silent, the tables laden with chemical
apparatus, the floor strewn with crates and littered with packing straw,
and the light falling dimly through the foggy cupola. At the further
end, a flight of stairs mounted to a door covered with red baize;
and through this, Mr. Utterson was at last received into the doctor's
cabinet. It was a large room fitted round with glass presses, furnished,
among other t