_--in my mouth, I could not,
had a king's crown been the reward. I retired to my chamber, and on the
plea of indisposition directed that I should on no account be disturbed.
Night had fallen, and it was growing somewhat late, when I was startled
out of the painful reverie in which I was still absorbed by the sudden
pulling up of a furiously-driven coach, followed by a thundering summons
at the door, similar to that which aroused me on the evening of Mrs.
Rushton's death. I seized my hat, rushed down stairs, and opened the
door. It was Mr. White!

"Well!--well!" I ejaculated.

"Quick--quick!" he exclaimed in reply. "La Houssaye--he is found--has
sent for us--quick! for life--life is on our speed!"

I was in the vehicle in an instant. In less than ten minutes we had
reached our destination--a house in Duke Street, Manchester Square.

"He is still alive," replied a young man in answer to Mr. White's hurried
inquiry. We rapidly ascended the stairs, and in the front apartment of
the first floor beheld one of the saddest, mournfulest spectacles which
the world can offer--a fine, athletic man, still in the bloom of natural
health and vigor, and whose pale features, but for the tracings there of
fierce, ungoverned passions, were strikingly handsome and intellectual,
stretched by his own act upon the bed of death! It was La Houssaye! Two
gentlemen were with him--one a surgeon, and the other evidently a
clergyman, and, as I subsequently found, a magistrate, who had been sent
for by the surgeon. A faint smile gleamed over the face of the dying man
as we entered, and he motioned feebly to a sheet of paper, which, closely
written upon, was lying upon a table placed near the sofa upon which the
unhappy suicide was reclining. Mr. White snatched, and eagerly perused
it. I could see by the vivid lighting up of his keen gray eye that it
was, in his opinion, satisfactory and sufficient.

"This," said Mr. White, "is your solemn deposition, knowing yourself to
be dying?"

"Yes, yes," murmured La Houssaye; "the truth--the truth!"

"The declaration of a man," said the clergyman with some asperity of
tone, "who defyingly, unrepentingly, rushes into the presence of his
Creator, can be of little value!"

"Ha!" said the dying man, rousing himself by a strong effort;
"I repent--yes--yes--I repent! I believe--do you hear?--and
repent--believe. Put that down," he added, in tones momently feebler
and more husky, as he pointed to the paper; "