tion. "You are sure he used a key?" he inquired at
last.

"My dear sir----" began Enfield, surprised out of himself.

"Yes, I know," said Utterson; "I know it must seem strange. The fact is,
if I do not ask you the name of the other party it is because I know it
already. You see, Richard, your tale has gone home. If you have been
inexact in any point, you had better correct it."

"I think you might have warned me," returned the other with a touch of
sullenness. "But I have been pedantically exact, as you call it. The
fellow had a key; and what's more, he has it still. I saw him use it not
a week ago."

Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man
presently resumed. "Here is another lesson to say nothing," said he. "I
am ashamed of my long tongue. Let us make a bargain never to refer to
this again."

"With all my heart," said the lawyer. "I shake hands on that, Richard."

SEARCH FOR MR. HYDE

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre
spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a
Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of
some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the
neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go
soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as the
cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his
business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part
of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will, and sat
down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph,
for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that it was made, had
refused to lend the least assistance in the making of it; it provided
not only that, in case of the decease of Henry Jekyll, M.D., D.C.L.,
LL.D., F.R.S., &c., all his possessions were to pass into the hands of
his "friend and benefactor Edward Hyde," but that in case of Dr.
Jekyll's "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding
three calendar months," the said Edward Hyde should step into the said
Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or
obligation, beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the
doctor's household. This document had long been the lawyer's eyesore. It
offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary
sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest. An