ed in."

"Shall I keep this and sleep upon it?" asked Utterson.

"I wish you to judge for me entirely," was the reply. "I have lost
confidence in myself."

"Well, I shall consider," returned the lawyer.--"And now one word more:
it was Hyde who dictated the terms in your will about that
disappearance?"

The doctor seemed seized with a qualm of faintness; he shut his mouth
tight and nodded.

"I knew it," said Utterson. "He meant to murder you. You have had a fine
escape."

"I have had what is far more to the purpose," returned the doctor
solemnly: "I have had a lesson--O God, Utterson, what a lesson I have
had!" And he covered his face for a moment with his hands.

On his way out, the lawyer stopped and had a word or two with Poole. "By
the by," said he, "there was a letter handed in to-day: what was the
messenger like?" But Poole was positive nothing had come except by post;
"and only circulars by that," he added.

This news sent off the visitor with his fears renewed. Plainly the
letter had come by the laboratory door; possibly indeed, it had been
written in the cabinet; and if that were so, it must be differently
judged, and handled with the more caution. The newsboys, as he went,
were crying themselves hoarse along the footways: "Special edition.
Shocking murder of an M.P." That was the funeral oration of one friend
and client; and he could not help a certain apprehension lest the good
name of another should be sucked down in the eddy of the scandal. It
was, at least, a ticklish decision that he had to make; and,
self-reliant as he was by habit, he began to cherish a longing for
advice. It was not to be had directly; but perhaps, he thought, it might
be fished for.

Presently after, he sat on one side of his own hearth, with Mr. Guest,
his head clerk, upon the other, and midway between, at a nicely
calculated distance from the fire, a bottle of a particular old wine
that had long dwelt unsunned in the foundations of his house. The fog
still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps
glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these
fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life was still rolling on
through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. But the
room was gay with firelight. In the bottle the acids were long ago
resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows
richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on